With Minima 3, things start to get a little more complex. There are only 3 pieces and no voids when the puzzle is complete. The box has a couple of entryways as well as 2 perpendicular windows that must be utilized in 2 of the 3 required rotations. As with many of these minima puzzles, the first piece is the trickiest and then the other two are relatively trivial.
The Minima puzzles seem to ramp up in difficulty from 1-12 and the moves in each successive puzzle build on each other, so by the time you get to the later puzzles in the series, you have many tools to work with and you’ve seen and experienced many types of rotations.
If this puzzle is exciting for you, then you’ll love the rest of the series. I find these puzzles so much fun because they are simple, but the solutions are often very elegant. You can work on these for hours trying to figure out how they work, but when you do finally get there, you realize that the moves are mostly pretty basic and straightforward. How can 3 little pieces be so difficult to figure out. I mean, most of the time, there’s only a handful of combinations. It seems like it would be easy to just try them all out and use the one that works. But somehow, it’s a lot harder than that. That’s the genius of the Minima Series and why so many puzzlers are drawn to these.
