3-in-1 Squeeze-Them-In Puzzle

Cut and assembled puzzle, ready-to-play setup

Introduction

You can find the laser-cut/engrave SVG file of this puzzle at ATOMM, MakerWorld and CuttingPath

This 3-in-1 Squeeze-Me-In puzzle comes with a square board, three small pieces, and nine large pieces. As you can see in the picture above, the three small pieces are tucked into the three small empty cutouts, just like they look. The nine large pieces are arranged to fit snugly into the square board. The picture below shows how the puzzle looks before all the pieces are on the boards. There’s a little figure in the lower right corner of the square board that shows you how to put the nine large pieces back into the ready-to-play setup.

The challenge here is to fit one of the tiny pieces into the big square board, along with the nine bigger pieces, without any of them overlapping. You’ll probably have to shuffle, turn, and flip all ten pieces to get it right. This puzzle is a triple threat because it has three small pieces, and each one is its own puzzle to solve. As you can see in the picture above, getting the small triangle in is a breeze with 16 ways to do it, but the small parallelogram and square are trickier, with only three and two solutions, respectively.