Taking a break from the frustration that is Andy's Labyrinth viewtopic.php?p=314242#p314242, I decided to try my hand at the Dayan Bermuda cubes. I had purchased Earth and Jupiter, but had gotten hooked on the Crazy Planets/C2F/CB4 puzzles before the Bermudas arrived, so they went untouched. I found Earth fairly straight forward and Jupiter not that much harder. Still, they were fun, and I wanted to do the others. So using the pieces from my two cubes, I made frankenstein versions of the others. Doing so convinced me that if Dayan had chosen to, they could have laid out the cubes in such a way that, like many of the other planet puzzles, a couple would suffice to create a kit that would work for all the planets. So I did some work at re-arranging the colors and came up with this:
If we set aside this issue of the newer Venus cubes being Fishered and allow for a slight re-arrangement of where the Fishered faces are on the inner planets, then you can use the pieces from Mercury and either Jupiter or Uranus to get the complete set. The edges pieces, the three-piece corners and the triangles all come apart in a similar way the Crazy Planet puzzles and this can be used to minimize the number of needed pieces. A different arrangement of stickering is required, but once the pieces are stickered properly then, just like other kits, it will simply require a re-arrangement of the pieces.

I have a Mercury on order and new stickers coming from Olivérs. When my kit is complete, I will post some pictures of the completed cubes and the kit itself.

It took four weeks for the Mercury Bermuda cube to arrive, but even before it did I discovered that I had misunderstood. Both the Mercury and the Venus cubes are Fishered, when I had thought it was just the Venus cube. This meant that in my calculation of what pieces I was ordering I was loosing four edge pairs and four center caps. It was a lucky mistake though as it gave me the pieces need to make both of those cubes in their Fishered styles. Still, it turns out that you can not make the set with just two cubes. It requires three. Here is the set of pieces I ended up with: The white plastic pieces come from the Earth cube I had before attempting to make a set. So that my set is made using Mercury, Jupiter and Earth. The white pieces are only needed for constructing Mercury, Venus and Earth so that the more interesting puzzles are all in black plastic. I was short of center caps, so I restructured the first three puzzles differently from the chart above. I chose this arrangement because it allowed me to do away with a needed red square center. With the three puzzles I used, I can construct almost all twelve of the Bermuda puzzles. The only one missing is the star puzzle due to its required nine cubic corner pieces.

If you have not purchased any of the these puzzles and would like to be able to construct all twelve puzzles, you can purchase the Star, the Barrel and Earth. You will be short triangle center pieces, so you will want to construct the Mercury and Venus cubes using the green and blue sides as top and bottom. I purchased stickers from Olivérs stickers and these were the first I have gotten from him. They are much better than the original stickers; I was particularly stuck by the blue stickers.

I had as much fun putting together the kit as I did solving the puzzles. I find Mercury, Earth, Mars and Jupiter/Neptune to solve with very little differences. Saturn/Uranus are really the most interesting to me.

Now it is back to the CrazyB4 cubes.