Akku - Pelikan

Designer: Dr. Volker Latussek

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:

“Dr. Volker Latussek has been providing some fabulous puzzles to Pelikan for a few years now. They are all extremely clever and challenging – some so clever and challenging that they are beyond my abilities (Euklid for Nick remains unsolved to my intense embarassment). In this release we have Akku. This consists of a wonderful Acacia box and some very precisely crafted Maple pieces to be packed inside. There are 9 L shaped pieces to be fitted into the interior of the box. The cavity is 4x4x3 units in size and each L is 3x3x1 unit meaning that there will be just 3 holes in the packed puzzle but with such a large awkward shape the assembly will need some rotations to get the pieces into the restricted opening. The puzzle is shipped in a special shape that Dr Latussek instructed and I took the pieces out of the box for my photo only to find that I could not get them back into that shape again! This was going to be a foreboding of what was to come. I spent quite a while trying to find how to assemble a 4x4x3 cuboid from these pieces and even this was a struggle. In the end I resorted to Burrtools to try and find the possible arrangements – there are 6 ways to assemble the shape. Time to pick one and get it into the box. Easier said than done! This is a serious puzzling challenge. After 2 evenings of attempts, I finally worked it out – wonderful idea. Think of how best to rotate an L shaped piece and then see what you can do with it. There are a LOT of rotations involved!”