Last week-end was the 30th anniversary of one of my best friends. For the occasion, I wanted to craft him a small puzzle with a custom secret drawing, as a reminder of some shared memories.
I came upon Erik & Martin Demaine's creation for CSAIL 2006, a print & play puzzle based on folding, which was exactly what I was looking for !
Hence I wrote a web version, with a customizable background : any image can be uploaded !
You can find this puzzle online here : folded_puzzle.html
I am very happy with the result, and I hope you will enjoy trying to solve it 😉
You can export the puzzle to an SVG file, which can then easily be converted to a printable PDF using dedicated websites. I tried to provide a direct PDF export, but it was a pain due to poor support of SVG in web browsers PDF converters. If you don't care about the puzzle image and just want a printable PDF, go visit Erik Demaine website on the first hyperlink above.
To be honest, it was both very funny and painful to craft. Why ? First, because I had to resort to using SVG rotations to build the star-shape, and it was a nightmare to come up with the correct trigonometry in order to exactly mimic the original model.
And second, because it was actually quite hard to solve !! I have to admit I offered it to my good friend without solving it first hand 🙃 I only solved it yesterday evening ! But I added a few hints at the bottom of the web page, in case you need help 🤭
