Hi, guys!
It's time to present my best puzzle to date - Bulgarian Minx. Bulgaria is my home country and Bulgarian sounds a lot like Hungarian - an allusion to the home country of the Rubik's Cube.
The idea of the puzzle came when I saw the Dodoctahedron - a puzzle by Raphaël Mouflin.

That reminded me that there is a connection between the octahedron and the dodecahedron. So I wandered if there is a way to combine all 5 platonic solids in one. I found out that there is already s skewb made into a dodecahedron that doesn't shapeshift. The skewb is connected to the tetrahedron, the octahedron and the cube so I had to add a megaminx in the mix witch is connected to the dodecahedron and the icosahedron. The stored cuts that I introduced are all the possible ways the skewb planes can cut into the outer megaminx so I ended up with a puzzle that is closer to a hybrid between Chopasaurus and Megaminx. As you can see in the next rendering, all the pieces of that hypothetical hybrid are present in my puzzle and they can be mixed up and scrambled but the movments of the Chopasaurus are restricted to only 4 of its 10 cut planes.


So here you go - another connection to the icosahedron through the skewb The resulting puzzle is connected to all the platonic solids and never shapeshifts or bandages.

You can find the progress of this build in the WIP thread http://twistypuzzles.com/forum/viewtopi ... =9&t=31808
You can see there that the forum members helped a lot for this puzzle to work this well from the firs build. The most brilliant idea came from the forum member 5284973. He proposed to use Greg's and Felix' method in their 2x2x2 + Megaminx to expose the inner puzzle on the surface via circles. That was a puzzle I forgot about when I was designing mine and it never occurred to me why the circles are there anyway . So a great tip 5284973(I'm asking for your name again).

Next I have to thank Brandon and Carl that helped me correct a bug in the design and Oliver for the great stickers.

If you want to play with the puzzle on you computer, it's available on pCubes.

I can also provide you with assembled and dyed copy with set of stickers from Oliver that you can apply yourself

In my excitement after stickering it I accidentally scrambled it so I can only show you a video of me trying desperately to put it back in solved state

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGqr7kACgCM

Oh man, what a beautiful puzzle I'm glad you went with the fully unbandaged route, I feel like that's always more fun than arbitrary limited cuts.

What is the relation to cube symmetry? I can see all the other shapes, except this.

5284973 wrote:Oh man, what a beautiful puzzle I'm glad you went with the fully unbandaged route, I feel like that's always more fun than arbitrary limited cuts.

What is the relation to cube symmetry? I can see all the other shapes, except this.

Well, The Skewb is a cube isn't it?

The Skewb is debatably an octahedral shape mod much in the same way that the Bauhinia Dodecahedron could be called a shape mod of the Radiolarian II.

Tyrgannus wrote:The Skewb is debatably an octahedral shape mod much in the same way that the Bauhinia Dodecahedron could be called a shape mod of the Radiolarian II.

I agree with you. The skewb has a tetrahedral axis system and in fact I was arguing the same thing in other threads.
But it has 8 corners looking exactly the same from the outside and rotating independently from one another so it disguises itself very well as an octahedron
It will be interesting to read your thoughts on the Bauhinia-Radiolarian connection. I didn't understand what exactly do you mean.

Edit: I just took the weight - it's 222 grams. Edge length is 35 mm

This is a beautiful puzzle that grew almost literally in front of our eyes. Your cubes are becoming more and more complex and difficult!