Types of Puzzles: Six Groups by the Material You Work With
Word, number, picture and spatial, physical piece, pure logic and chessboard puzzles: what each type of puzzle uses and how to begin.
Riddle10 blog
Articles about spatial puzzles
Types of Spatial Puzzles: Fold, Turn, Pack, Cut, Tile and Flip
Folding, rotating, packing, cutting, tiling, and mirror and shadow puzzles: the six types of spatial puzzles, with worked examples and riddles to try.
Cube Counting Puzzles: How to Count Every Cube in a Stack
Count every cube in a stack, hidden ones included. Use a height grid, check by layers and diagonals, then try a worked example and a practice puzzle.
How to Solve Mental Rotation Puzzles: Turned or Mirrored?
Tell a turned shape from a mirror image with one landmark and one side check, read cube nets, then try a worked example and two practice puzzles.
Jigsaw Puzzle Strategy: Edges, Sorting, Clusters and the Last Pieces
Solve jigsaw puzzles in order: edges first, sort by colour and shape, grow clusters, then fit the last pieces by shape. Worked example and practice puzzle.
Rep-Tile Puzzles: How to Cut a Shape Into Copies of Itself
Learn to cut a shape into smaller copies of itself: count cells, fill tight corners first, avoid bad pockets, then try a worked and a practice puzzle.
How to Solve a Polycube Puzzle: Volume, Colour and Layers
Pack cube pieces into a box with four checks: volume, a 3D checkerboard colour count, awkward pieces first and layer by layer, plus a practice puzzle.
Dissection Puzzles: Cutting a Triangle Into a Square
Any polygon can be cut into any other of equal area, but how few pieces? Why four convex pieces is the record for turning a triangle into a square.
Tangram Puzzle Solutions: A Step-by-Step Method
Place the large triangles first, read the corners and flip the parallelogram. Seven pieces, their size rules and nine verified tangram solutions.
Packing Puzzles: The 70 Square and the Thirty Colour Cubes
Why 24 squares cannot tile a 70 square, how a shorter proof is being built from the edges, and how 30 painted cubes copy each other.