Pierre Letouzey

This page is about a beautiful wooden puzzle that puzzled me during more than twenty years. I finally managed to solve it in Fall 2006. Do you want a try ?

A box

As far as I can remember, I always had the following box in my room :

It should have been given to me when I was quite young, probably around ten. This box forms a cube of about 9cm, with the following faces:

You can notice the Sphinx, as well as the square and compass of the freemasons. "Casse-tête" is the french for puzzle (literally head-breaker). Concerning Grandjouan, it seems to be the name of the puzzle builder (references about it on the internet are really sparse). Important detail: "Damier" is written on one face, meaning checkerwork.

A heap of pieces

Now, what's inside the box ? This:

And that's all. In particular, no solution sheet in the neighborhood. Somebody (probably me) was smarter enough to break apart this puzzle ... but not smart enough to rebuild it. So the pieces stayed apart, in bulk, during all these years. From time to time, I encountered the box again and tried again to solve it and failed again. By the way, the task of putting all the pieces back in the box is non-obvious, since they cannot fit all when placed in a naive way. But the real issue was: after all these years, I had completely forgotten the shape of the solution I was trying to rebuild.

So, the last thing you ought to know is the precise description of the pieces. With this, you're as informed as I was. Every pieces have the same dimensions : 8cm x 2cm x 2cm (slightly more in fact). Here are the seven different shapes that occur (thanks to blender):

Finally, for each shape, number of pieces and color can vary:

• Shape ①: one piece, in dark wood
• Shape ②: two pieces, one in dark wood and the other in clear wood
• Shape ③: one piece, in dark wood
• Shape ④: one piece, in dark wood
• Shape ⑤: one piece, in dark wood
• Shape ⑥: one piece, in clear wood
• Shape ⑦: ten pieces including four dark and six clear

Some Hints

If you need some help, in case of despair, here is a few hints inspired by the mind process that lead me to the solution...

• Hint 1
• Hint 2 and its associated image
• Hint 3

Complete Solution

Are you sure you want to give up ?

The original solution sheet, found recently on this website: 200 casse-tête.

Two pictures of my puzzle now completed and solved: 1 et 2.

TODO: Faire un jour une animation blender de la solution ...