Soma Penultimate - Can you get these pieces into the box?
Channel: OskarPuzzle
Date: 08/10/2022

Print it yourself at https://oskarvandeventer.nl/Print-It-Yourself/. Buy at https://i.materialise.com/en/shop/item/soma-penultimate or at https://www.shapeways.com/product/SMWNMJDES/soma-penultimate   Soma Penultimate was designed with inspiration and help by George Miller. Volker Latussek designed Soma Pack (https://www.puzzlemaster.ca/browse/inventors/drvolkerlatussek/12885-soma-pack) which is a Soma-Cube packing problem where the seven Soma pieces need to be placed into a cage through a V-shaped hole. Whereas there are three places to put that V-shaped hole, Volker used only two. So Soma Penultimate has the V-shaped hole put on the third possible place. Extensive search yielded not solutions with regular Soma pieces, not even after rotations inside the box. However, the puzzle becomes solvable by rounding off the Y-shaped Soma piece. The puzzle has a unique solution.

Edit: Volker Latussek just (October 2022) found a solution that uses the original straight blue piece.
Edit 2: Volker's original Soma Pack design dates back to 2015. Mr. Ching-Mao Huang (A-Mao), together with Tzy Hung Chein (Felix) had already discovered this third variation in 2017, which was produced by Brian Menold of https://woodwondersonline.com/ in that same year.

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