Dr. Volker Latussek: Harder Than It Looks

There are designers whose name on a box tells you what kind of puzzle it is. Volker Latussek's tells you something different: whatever this looks like, it is much harder than that.

He makes some of the hardest geometric puzzles anyone is currently producing, and he does it without piece counts that scare people off. Seven pieces. Five pieces. Nine. The difficulty is never in the quantity, and that is exactly why his puzzles catch out solvers who think they can size a challenge up by looking at it.

Who Is Volker Latussek?

A German designer whose puzzles are produced in wood by Pelikan Puzzles, and one of the few people working almost entirely on a single question: what happens to a packing puzzle when you add constraints that have nothing to do with volume.

Everyone knows how to make a packing puzzle harder by adding pieces. Latussek almost never does. Instead he changes what counts as solved.

Three Ways He Makes a Box Difficult

His work runs in series, and each series is built on one constraint.

Restricted openings - the Euklid series

An ordinary packing puzzle gives you an open box: place pieces anywhere, in any order, from any direction. Latussek closes most of it. What is left is a slot, a partial face, a gap smaller than the pieces going through it.

Now the arrangement is not enough on its own. Every piece also needs a legal path in - and the piece that belongs at the bottom may be one that physically cannot reach the bottom until three others are already placed. Euklid is the series he is best known for, and he spent more than six years refining it before releasing the version he considered finished.

Flop - the Flop series

A variation with its own name. The opening will not admit a piece the way the piece wants to go, so each one has to enter flat - flopped through the gap and then rotated into position once inside.

It sounds like a small distinction from a restricted opening. In the hand it is not: you are not solving where pieces go, you are solving what attitude each one has to be in at the moment it crosses the boundary. Soma Flop applies the idea to the seven standard Soma pieces, and is probably the most elegant demonstration of it.

Anti-slide - Less Is More, Shrinking Soma

The strictest of the three. An anti-slide puzzle is not solved when the pieces are inside. It is solved when the pieces are inside and none of them can move. Shake the box and nothing shifts, because every gap that would let a piece travel has been filled by something else.

His Less Is More shows how far he will take an idea. Nine pentominoes are packed into a frame so that nothing slides. Then you remove a piece - and the remaining eight must still be unable to slide. Then another, and another, down to three. Each stage is a puzzle, and they are nested inside one another.

This is the mechanism that frustrates experienced solvers in a very particular way. You will build something that fills the space correctly, look at it, and still be wrong, because one piece has half a unit of play in it.

Shrinking Soma is the version built on the Soma set, and the joke is the pieces. There are 240 ways to build the ordinary Soma cube and almost none of them help: the space is 4x4x4, the opening is restricted, and the result has to be sealed and stay put when shaken.

He Designs the Presentation, Not Just the Puzzle

One detail that explains a lot about how he works: Latussek specifies how each puzzle should be presented to the solver. Which face is up, how the pieces are laid out, what you can see before you start.

That is not packaging. In a puzzle where the opening is the difficulty, showing the box from one angle gives away the answer and showing it from another hides something you need. The presentation carries part of the challenge, so he designs it with the same care as the geometry.

The reviewer at PuzzleMad put the same observation another way after working through a run of his designs: Latussek never places an element unnecessarily, and every hole serves a purpose.

In His Own Words

He writes short design notes when a puzzle is released, and they are unusually candid about the process. On one of his MINIMA designs:

MINIMA FOR FREDERIC was actually meant to mark the end of my foray into the world of MINIMAs. Over the last few months, I've been playing once again with one of my favourite building blocks... which building blocks could be used to fill a MINIMA box and provide it with suitable openings.

And on a later puzzle, Apteek, explaining why it exists at all:

When working with the usual v's and developing FARMACIA, I had to learn that some very nice moves are not possible. However, from my experience with FILLING V, I know how powerful L's are... the beauty of the APTEEK solution justifies the mixture of eight v's and L's.

Both notes are reported by PuzzleMad. What they show is a designer working piece-shape by piece-shape across years, carrying what he learns from one puzzle into the next - which is why the series have the character they do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where to Go Next

If restricted openings appeal, Osanori Yamamoto built a career on the same constraint with far fewer pieces, and is a gentler way in.

Otherwise browse the Latussek collection, the wider 3D packing puzzles range, or the full mechanical puzzles catalogue.