Hungarian Rings: Older Than It Looks

Quick answer: the Hungarian Rings is 38 balls in four colours on two overlapping circular tracks, and you solve it by rotating the rings until each colour forms one continuous run. Endre Pap brought out the version everyone knows in 1982, but the mechanism was already patented in the United States by William Churchill in 1893.

Best for: people who liked the Rubik's Cube for the algorithms rather than the shape.

Two rings that share two balls. That sharing is the whole mechanism, and it is the reason the puzzle is harder than it looks.

What Is the Hungarian Rings Puzzle?

A flat disc with two circular grooves that overlap at two points. Thirty-eight balls sit in the grooves: two colours have ten balls and two have nine. Each ring rotates independently, carrying its balls around.

The two intersection points are shared. A ball sitting in an intersection belongs to both rings at once, so turning one ring takes a ball out of the other. The goal is to arrange all four colours into four unbroken runs.

The intersections sit five positions apart, meaning four balls lie between them. That spacing is not decoration, it determines everything about how the puzzle mixes.

Who Invented the Hungarian Rings?

Two answers, ninety years apart, and the second one is the interesting half.

Endre Pap, a Hungarian engineer, produced the flat two-ring version marketed as the Hungarian Rings in 1982. It arrived at the height of the Rubik's Cube boom, from Hungary, and was received as part of that wave.

The idea was not new. US patent 507,215, filed by William Churchill on 28 May 1891 and granted on 24 October 1893, describes the same intersecting-track mechanism. The puzzle that reads as a Rubik-era invention is a Victorian one that happened to be re-released into the right decade.

That pattern is common in this field, and it is the same story as the 15 puzzle, where the famous version is decades removed from the origin.

How Do You Solve the Hungarian Rings?

In phases, and the phases exist because of the intersections.

There is no useful way to place one ball at a time, because moving a ring moves everything in it. What works instead is to solve colours in an order that protects what is already done.

Start with one colour, placed around the intersections. The standard approach is to gather one colour into the inner region covering the intersection points. Because the intersections are the only cells shared between the rings, controlling them is what lets you move balls between rings deliberately rather than accidentally.

Then separate the remaining colours into their rings. With the first colour locked around the shared cells, the rest can be sorted with far less collateral damage.

Finish with short repeatable sequences. As with the Rubik's Cube, the endgame is a small set of move sequences that cycle three or four balls while returning everything else to where it was. That is what a solving method is for puzzles in this family: not cleverness, but a library of controlled, reversible damage.

Why Is It Harder Than It Looks?

Because it is flat, visible and entirely unforgiving of casual progress.

Nothing is hidden. Every ball is in view the whole time, which makes people assume it will yield to inspection. It does not, because each rotation moves ten balls at once and undoes most of what the previous rotation achieved. The puzzle punishes improvisation harder than a cube does, where at least a corner stays a corner.

The flatness is also why so many people give up on it. There is no satisfying partial state to admire, and until a colour is fully gathered it looks like nothing has happened.

Why Does the Ball Count Matter?

Because the four colours are not equal, and that asymmetry rules out the tidiest solving approach.

Thirty-eight balls split ten, ten, nine, nine. If all four groups were the same size you could treat the puzzle symmetrically, learning one procedure and applying it four times with the colours relabelled. You cannot. Two of the runs are a ball longer than the other two, so the target arrangement has a built-in handedness.

Combined with intersections five positions apart, this is why published methods are phased rather than uniform: the order the colours are solved in is part of the method, not a matter of taste. It is also why a solver who works one out independently usually arrives at a different order from the printed one, and both work.

What Should You Try Instead?

The Hungarian Rings is a permutation puzzle, and we make nothing in that family. There is no sequence-of-rotations puzzle in our catalogue, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

What we do make is the other kind of sequencing: puzzles where the order of moves matters but the pieces are solid objects rather than tracked tokens. Snake Cube is the clearest of those, with a full walkthrough, and Tower of Hanoi is the purest.

If what appealed was the algorithmic endgame, the nearest honest match is a hard burr, where the sequence is long and forced. The full range is in mechanical puzzles.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Hungarian Rings puzzle?

A flat puzzle of 38 balls in four colours sitting in two overlapping circular tracks. The rings rotate independently and share two balls at their intersections. The goal is to arrange each colour into one continuous run.

Who invented the Hungarian Rings?

Endre Pap released the familiar version in 1982, but the mechanism was patented earlier by William Churchill as US patent 507,215, filed 28 May 1891 and granted 24 October 1893.

How do you solve the Hungarian Rings?

In phases. Gather one colour around the two intersection points first, since those are the only cells shared between the rings and controlling them is what lets you move balls deliberately. Separate the remaining colours into their rings, then finish with short sequences that cycle three or four balls and leave the rest untouched.

How many balls does the Hungarian Rings have?

38, in four colours: two colours have ten balls and two have nine. The two intersection points lie five positions apart, with four balls between them.

Is the Hungarian Rings harder than a Rubik's Cube?

Different rather than strictly harder, and less forgiving of improvisation. Every ball is visible the whole time, which makes people expect to solve it by looking, but each rotation moves ten balls at once and undoes most of the previous one.