Little Kay was quite blue with cold, indeed almost black, but he did not feel it; for the Snow Queen had kissed away the icy
shiverings, and his heart was already a lump of ice. He dragged some sharp, flat pieces of ice to and fro, and placed them
together in all kinds of positions, as if he wished to make something out of them; just as we try to form various figures with little
tablets of wood which we call "a Chinese puzzle." Kay's fingers were very artistic; it was the icy game of reason at which he
played, and in his eyes the figures were very remarkable, and of the highest importance; this opinion was owing to the piece of
glass still sticking in his eye. He composed many complete figures, forming different words, but there was one word he never
could manage to form, although he wished it very much. It was the word "Eternity." The Snow Queen had said to him, "When
you can find out this, you shall be your own master, and I will give you the whole world and a new pair of skates." But he could
not accomplish it.
--Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen
Quite often, the splinter in my own eye directs my attention to creating and solving geometrical puzzles. Usually, these puzzles use only pencil and paper, or a flat game board, rather than physical objects that can be manipulated in three dimensions. This time, however, I thought of a brain-teaser that could be created using Icehouse pieces.
I taped together 6 large pieces, (also known as queens from their usage in Martian Chess,) one of each color, so that the bases aligned with the sides of a cube. (I think that this basic arrangement was discovered by someone on the Icehouse mailing list a while back, but I can't find the post now. If anyone remembers who wrote it, (or can show that I am hallucinating its existence,) please tell me so I can fix this page.) Before taping on the last piece, I placed, inside the red queen, a small blue piece, with a small yellow stacked inside it. Inside the blue queen, I stacked a yellow and a red, and inside the yellow queen, a red and a blue.
I then set for myself the task of jiggling the IceStar around until the pawns of each color were stacked together inside the queen of the same color.
This was hard. I soon came up with techniques for getting an individual piece turned in the right direction and in the right position, but not without other pieces getting in the way, and correctly placed pieces getting dislodged. The black queen was extremely annoying, since it doesn't let you see what is inside it.
Then, as I was about to give up and tear the IceStar apart, I noticed that, quite by accident, I had managed to get the blue pawns in place inside the blue queen. Jiggling feverishly, I got the yellow pawns and the first red pawn into their respective queens. But the last red pawn was upside down, and the methods I had learned to turn a piece around could not be performed without dislodging the blue or yellow pawns. A few times it got stuck inside the blue or yellow pieces, (where it was very hard to remove without splitting the paired pawns instead,) or on a weird diagonal in the central cube. But finally I solved it.
After I took the picture above, I shook up the IceStar for a while to randomize it, then gave it to my little sister to try. A couple minutes later, I heard her yelling at the pieces in frustration. So feel free to try this out yourself, but consider yourself warned.