Double Spin Puzzle

thingiverse

Double Spin is a tabletop brain teaser with two dials that let you move colored "pie" pieces around a pair of circles. The circles interlock the pies so they can get mixed up, and it's up to you to spin them back into place to make all the colors match again! I created this puzzle because I love Rubik's Cubes and wanted to make the essence of that puzzle fun for everyone. This puzzle is a strict subset of the classic 3x3 Rubik's Cube which lets you see all the pieces at once (this puzzle is the same as if you only allowed yourself to turn two faces of the cube and only considered the edge and center pieces on those faces). This makes it easier to solve than a cube for beginners and provides a nice challenge for experienced puzzlers by removing degrees of freedom you may be used to. If you've ever wondered "how does anyone figure out how to solve a puzzle like this?" I want to share some tips to help you explore this puzzle. Choose a simple pattern to follow for turning the two dials and then repeat it over and over again and see what you get. The pattern you repeat doesn't have to be very many moves; try first with two move patterns, then three and four and so on. One of the great things about this puzzle is that if you get stuck or you make a mistake, you can turn it over and put the pieces back in place. See if you can discover a few of those repeated patterns that swap or rotate pieces while leaving most of the pattern in place. When you're ready challenge yourself to solve the puzzle. Get as far as you can until you think going any further will mess up the progress you have already made, then use a couple of the pattern tricks you discovered to exchange the last few pieces to finish the puzzle. It's one thing to memorize a series of steps needed to solve a puzzle, but it's much more satisfying to be able to discover the solution yourself. Whether you've solved a Rubik's Cube on your own before or not, I hope you have a great time learning how to solve this puzzle!