Julian Vault #2: What's a Squzzle?

On our unexpected Julian game week, we pulled this beaten-up old box out of one of the drawers full of games. 

It was a "Squzzle Puzzle" from Mindware (2000), with a theme of Animal Babies.  It was confusing at first until one side of the box pointed out that there are three separate 3x3 puzzles inside.  Here they are, separated out ...


This felt like it would be a no-brainer.  A 3x3 grid puzzle for kids, right?  And with three puzzles, we could each start working on one, and figure out the other one later, right?  But it went sideways almost right away.  There are 9 cards with 4 possible rotations, so is that 9^4 combinations or 4^9?  Times the number of arrangements of the 3x3 grid itself.  We got near solutions where only the very last card failed, but that's no solution at all.  Trying to find a match for a particular spot, I naturally started reading the sides clockwise, so I might be looking for a bear-butt rabbit-head (in that order) only to find there is no such combo.  It doesn't look like the same animal ever appears on to consecutive sides, but there were cases of the same animal appearing directly across from each other. 


Then I thought that maybe the one tile with all four heads or feet might be the centerpiece, but I came no closer to solving it.  One of the hotel staff was amused by this; she said hardly anyone ever picks that one, and nobody ever solves it.

I was not expecting to find much about these online, but here is a demo from Fun Squared Games.

This was an unexpected gem of annoying puzzle mojo.  Thumbs up.

Now they are sold individually, and they have about two dozen themes available.
And the publisher offers clues (one tile shown) for each of their puzzles in stock.

Apparently, these are part of a larger family of puzzles called Scramble Squares and probably a lot of other names.  Here is a page on Instructable about how to write code to solve these.

And this appears to be the nest where all the Scramble Squares hang out ... over 200 designs listed at the moment.  This series were first designed by Kathie Gavin in 1993, their story can be found here.  And again, they provide hints showing one piece in a correct position.








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