Pentominoes pocket puzzle

I love Tetris.

I love how its simplicity has charmed a massive number of users since 1984 making one of the most played and recognized games of all time, the history of the game and its creator Alexey Pajitnov are also fascinating pieces that computer science owns, from that is where this project was born.

Pajitnov inspired his program on board games and puzzles that he played on his youth, one of them being pentominoes, basic geometries created by 5 equal-sized squares connected edge to edges. If you discard rotations and reflections from all possible arranges of those squares you get 12 different pieces. Pentominoes idea is to create different figures using just the 12 pieces, it is a very entertaining and mind-boggling game that is worth playing when you need some minutes -or hours- to kill.

I modeled all the parts in such way that it resembles a commercial board game with the capability to be stored inside your pocket. You can try to solve the pieces to make different arranges for the rectangle shape (using the 12 pieces and leaving no empty spaces on the board) of the board or you can be more creative and find different shapes!

On this project I included 4 different rectangular bases with lids with a solution engraved on the back side to ease storing the pieces when you are done with the game, but if you don’t want the solution on the lid, I also included models for clean lids. Some may say that is cheating to have an answer anytime on the back, but depending of the rectangle size, there are multiple possible solutions for the puzzle:

3x20 - 2 solutions this would be 50% cheating lol
4x15 - 368 solutions
5x12 - 1010 solutions
6x10 - 2339 solutions

So, you have plenty of possibilities for a little board game. :)

For more interesting facts about pentominoes:

http://puzzler.sourceforge.net/docs/pentominoes.html

I included the Fusion360 files if you want to edit the models.

Thanks!

Print instructions

Print settings:

Layer height: 0.20 mm (NORMAL)

Pretty much default on prusa slic3r with some tweaks as follows:

Filament: PLA (On this project I used Galaxy Black Prusament PLA for the case parts and green luktec PLA (mexican filament brand, they have a dinosaur as brand logo, love it!) for pentominoes)

Infill: 15% (You may use less)

I also changed the bridging angle to 135° to help the bridging parts for the letters on the lids to be as short as possible because since default is 0°, the gravity may affect the engraving look due to long bridging.