Goh Pit Khiam: Unusual Concepts, Few Pieces

Quick answer: Goh Pit Khiam is a Singaporean designer with well over sixty puzzles to his name and a habit of inventing concepts nobody else has had. His strongest work is in packing puzzles, and his Elbow Room took the Puzzlers' Award at the 2026 International Puzzle Party in Assisi. We carry five of his designs.

Best for: solvers who have done enough packing puzzles to think they know the form.

Most designers find a good idea and work it. That is not a criticism; a lifetime spent perfecting one thing is how plenty of great puzzles happen.

Goh Pit Khiam keeps arriving with ideas that were not on the table before he put them there.

The Chain Nobody Else Thought Of

Our best example is Chain Store, and it is the clearest demonstration of what makes him unusual.

The goal could not be simpler: pack the pieces flush into the box. The twist is that the five pieces are linked together in a chain and cannot be separated. You are not placing five things. You are placing one thing that bends in restricted ways.

So every habit a packing puzzle has taught you stops working. You cannot set a piece aside. You cannot solve the bottom layer and then the top, because moving any link moves its neighbours. Fold the chain to fit one corner and the far end swings out of the box.

That idea took a Jury Honorable Mention at the 2016 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition, and it remains the best thing of his we sell. It is also genuinely three-dimensional, which is where I think his best thinking happens: a deep box, a chain that has to fold down into it, and no way to cheat by working flat.

Elbow Room, and the 2026 Puzzlers' Award

His most recent design is also his most decorated. Elbow Room took the Puzzlers' Award at the 2026 competition in Assisi.

That prize is worth explaining. A judging committee picks almost everything at the Nob Yoshigahara competition. The Puzzlers' Award is the exception: it is voted on by the attendees, which is to say by several hundred of the most experienced solvers alive, after days of handling every entry on the table. I was there, and it was brilliant.

It is the design of his that people ask about most, and on the evidence of that room they are right to.

Sixty Designs, and a Twenty-Two Piece Burr

The packing puzzles are where I rate him highest, but the range underneath them is what makes the phrase unusual concepts fair rather than flattering.

He has designed well over sixty puzzles. At one end sit the three-piece trays we carry. At the other sits the Ternary Burr: twenty-two pieces, more than ninety notches and grooves, and a unique solution that takes seventy-five moves to free the first piece and over ninety to take apart completely. It folds n-ary counting logic, the mathematics behind puzzles like the Chinese rings, into an interlocking burr.

Same designer as the puzzle called Trivial. That span is rare.

His influence also runs through other people's work. Burrgrower, the level-raising software that Frans de Vreugd used to build Extreme Torture, was first drafted by Dic Sonneveld and rewritten in C++ by Goh Pit Khiam. Some of the hardest burrs in the world exist partly because of his code.

The Flat Ones We Carry

Four of his designs here are two-dimensional trays, and they share a quality our own product copy names well: the setup looks obvious and the solution is anything but.

• Trivial, three pieces, named with a straight face.
• Slidely Trivial, the sibling, where pieces may only enter flat through the opening. That one restriction changes the whole problem.
• Fish Tank, two fish and a staircase into a square tank.
• Wild West, four chunky pieces where three go in immediately and the fourth is the puzzle.

With three or four pieces there is nowhere to hide. Every wrong attempt is obvious, which is what makes them good teaching puzzles and faintly infuriating.

Which Goh Pit Khiam Puzzle to Start With

Start with Trivial if you want to meet the idea cheaply, and go to Chain Store if you want the design that earned him a mention at the IPP competition. Chain Store is rated Hard and the others Medium.

Everything of his we stock is in the Goh Pit Khiam collection, the form is packing puzzles, and the wider category is mechanical puzzles.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Goh Pit Khiam?

A Singaporean mechanical puzzle designer with well over sixty designs, best known for packing puzzles built on concepts nobody had tried before. His Elbow Room won the Puzzlers' Award at the 2026 International Puzzle Party, and his Chain Store took a Jury Honorable Mention in 2016.

What is Elbow Room by Goh Pit Khiam?

His entry to the 2026 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition in Assisi, where it won the Puzzlers' Award, the one prize voted on by the attending puzzlers rather than by a judging committee.

What is the Chain Store puzzle?

A three-dimensional packing puzzle in which five identical pieces are permanently linked into a chain that has to be folded flush into a box. Because the links cannot be separated, moving one moves its neighbours. It took a Jury Honorable Mention at the 2016 competition.

Are his puzzles good for beginners?

The three-piece trays are, and deliberately so. Trivial and Fish Tank are rated Medium with nothing hidden and nothing to force. Chain Store is Hard and better met second.