Happy Cube

The Red Happy Cube

Happy Cubes are a set of mechanical puzzles created in 1986 by the Belgian toy inventor Dirk Laureyssens. Until 2003, the company "Happy n.v." had the exclusive license to manufacture and sell these puzzles [1]. However, several other vendors have produced these earlier in the 80s or 90s or before 2003. Happy Cubes are also known by a number of other names, among them: "Cube It!" cubes, "Wirrel Warrel" (in Holland), "I.Q.ubes" and "Cococrash" (in Spain).

The Happy Cubes were made of 8mm-thick ethylene-vinyl acetate foam mats (also known as EVA). The tiles were based upon a 5x5 matrix where the outer squares may be present or absent. The central 3x3 kernel was fixed. Initially the puzzle is assembled into a 2-dimensional, flat 2x3 piece rectangle fitted into a frame. The basic challenge is to construct a perfect, 6-sided cube out of these 6 pieces. Usually, there is only one way to fit the pieces into a complete cube and it can be reached with various levels of difficulty by trial and error.

Variations

There are four families of Happy Cube puzzles, each containing 6 different cubes. Each family has a unique texture, style and difficulty level. Within each puzzle family the cubes are differentiared by color. The four families of Happy Cube puzzles are:

• The Little Genius - Textured with various icons of foods, vehicles, emotions etc.'. These are the easiest cubes to build and are designed for children aged three to seven years.
• The Happy Cube - Plainly colored with a single color each and with no texture, medium difficulty. These are the original cubes that were designed by the inventor in 1986.
• The Profi Cube - Textured with two interleaving colors, slightly harder to build than the Happy Cubes. There are two versions of this family, the first is colored with one dominant color and a black background and the newer version is much more lighter in shade, replacing the black background with a second dominant color similar in shade to the first one.
• The Marble Cube - Textures as colored marble, the hardest difficulty.

Solutions

The basic challenge of the Happy Cubes puzzles is to construct a single perfect cube from the 6 pieces of a single puzzle which share the same color scheme and texture. A subsequent challenge to this is to fit the pieces back in to the 2-dimensional frame from which they came.

With the presence of more than one puzzle available, pieces of several different cube puzzles can be joined together to make up larger and more complex structures other than the basic 6 faced cube. Some structures are more difficult to construct than others and the more pieces available, the easier it is to find a solution that makes a closed shape since there are more options of pieces to choose from. With enough pieces, virtually any structure imaginable can be constructed.

Two of the most popular complex structures are the 2×2×2 cube which is a perfect cube with each face made of 4 pieces (all in all, 24 pieces) and the Star structure, which is made of 6 cubes attached in a single-cube sized common center (all in all, 30 pieces). Several computer applications exist to aid in the process of designing large structures and finding solutions for them automatically.

External links

• Happy Cubes official site
• The inventor's home page
• The Happy Cube Solver An interactive application which solves happy cube puzzles and uses a 3D graphical user interface.
• Happy Cube (Wirrel Warrel) Solver The first well-known Happy Cube Solver, using textual interface