Pure bedlam visited the Lordpercy offices over Christmas, as a Bedlam Cube puzzle started its life with us. You may recall seeing the start of the Bedlam Cube on the BBC programme “the dragons den”. As the Cubes financial backer Danny Bamping went before the Dragons looking for funding to bring his puzzle business to the masses. Danny was successful in the Den securing 100k towards his business but in return giving up a large slice of his company to Rachel Elnaugh and Theo Paphitis. In the end Danny backed out of the deal and took a bank loan instead, no doubt frustrating the Dragons and ensuring hours of frustration for us with the Bedlam Cube.

The Cube looks simple enough consisting of thirteen polycubic pieces, twelve pentacubes and one tetracube which stack together to make a 4  x 4 cube. There are a few version from the colour basic cube with Yellow, red and blue pieces to the top end wooden cube which is a little more tricky with only wooden colour pieces.

The Cubes inventor Bruce Bedlam claims there are 19,186 distinct ways of completing the puzzle which frustrated us even more as we took 2 days to find just one way. You may have memories of the Rubik's cube which was frustrating to solve until you met a 12 year old who could do it in under 2 minutes. It was solved by twisting and turning the cube in a frenzy of crunching sounds until all the sides showed a single colour. The Bedlam Cube is more satisfying in that the 3D nature of the puzzle and texture of the wooden version is more like an intellectual version of giant Jenga.

Day one of the Bedlam cube review started well enough with good spirits and intrigue, we couldn’t help but wonder just how difficult it could be to stack a few wooden blocks together to make a cube. We soon found out as one by one the team tried to build the 4 layers of blocks into a cube with varying degrees of success. Try as we might the rather simple looking task continually defeated us sometimes by as little as the last block which would not fit in place without the use of a hacksaw (we did consider this option).

The current world record (held by Mr Bamping) is a shade over 11 seconds which puts our time (measured in hours) to shame, although after a few goes and a bit or online research you do become a little quicker. Should you not have the patience you can always purchase a solution from Bedlam puzzles website or even Google the Bedlam cube tool which provides online solutions and a 3D rotating cube to help you.

With the aid of the online tool we started to get the hang of the Cube but still a solution without the 3D model is a very slow process (for us) albeit an enjoyable challenge despite the odd strop and tea break. Some of the key pieces become obvious yet getting the more innocuous shapes into place always seemed to be our undoing.

There are a variety of options from the base Cube, various themed cubes, mini cubes, right up to the luxury real wood cube, which we would recommend if you are considering giving a Bedlam as a gift. From Dragons Den to Christmas puzzle of 2006 the Bedlam Cube has come a long way.

Prices start at around £8 for a the retro basic cube, through to £22 for the wooden version, ideal as a gift and something which will keep the brain cells working far better than a Nintendo + game for far less and no need for batteries either.

Published - 27/12/2006

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