Planet Puzzle: Ball pyramid thingy

 

It's past time for the middle post of an off-week, and I decided on another puzzle post. This time, I have something I've had lying around a while that I encountered long before. It comes from the 1970s, the probable golden age for this sort of thing. As an extra gimmick, it claims to harken back to ancient Egypt. It's called Tut's Tomb, and for extra amusement, here's a pic of the box I found online.

Notwithstanding the hype, this puzzle was manufactured by Mag-Nif, a once-prolific company that still has a website up but doesn't seem to have any content up. The puzzle was reportedly first released in 1972. I obtained mine without undue difficulty back in 2008. The name Imhotep is in fact that of a semi-historical figure believed to have lived around 2500 BC (2,500 years later than the box would indicate), who ended up credited for many of the actual or claimed inventions and achievements of ancient Egypt. It's part of a genre of "ball pyramid" puzzles dating mainly from the 1970s, though for once, there's no evidence of the item being reissued or directly copied by any other company. Here's a lineup of the pieces.

For my history, I first encountered this puzzle while staying with older friends of my family in late elementary school/ early 1990s. I remembered both the puzzle and the hyped-up directions; I also remember one of the pieces had broken in two. It was a fond enough memory for me to look it up and buy it years later. What I didn't realize until I got it is that this is incredibly easy, enough that even one minute was far longer than I needed. Even compared to the copies-of-copies party favor puzzles I have covered before, this did not generate any effort or investment of time or thought. Thus, it quickly went on the shelf and remained there until I thought of it for this feature. Here's a pic of it mid-assembly.

Turning to the details, the whole puzzle is only four pieces in two shapes, one consisting of four balls in a line and the other of six arranged in a rectangle. The key is to lay the two "grid" pieces at right angles to each other. What's tempting is that it looks like you ought to be able to arrange the pieces in different shapes. I have indeed seen building systems based on this lattice system (which Rob's Puzzle Page traces to mathematical constructs in the 1800s), but all these do is stack awkwardly. Here's one more pic of the grid pieces in position.

That ends this trip down memory lane. It's fitting enough that this would be a "quick" post that actually got done early, given how little time the puzzle took. I can't say I regret buying this; at the very least, it looks nice, though my shelves are already cluttered with things you could say the same thing about. Some things you get because you remember them, some things you don't because you prefer to just remember them. And that's all for now, more to come!