K-Dron

If you like biting your fist in frustration, nibbling your nails in exasperation and slapping your forehead in eureka-style celebration, you're going to love K-Dron. Why? Because it's one of the most infuriatingly addictive little brain-teasers ever to grace our pages. You'll be hooked in seconds.

Without getting too technical, K-Drons are complex shapes discovered by Polish visionary Janusz Kapusta (no, us neither) and they form the basis of this brilliant take-anywhere puzzle. The idea is to fiddle with the K-Dron pieces (four black and four white) and reproduce the various patterns shown in the accompanying booklet.

Easy


It sounds pretty straightforward but it's not. In fact there are 38,416 possible combinations with just eight K-Drons. And once you get up close and personal with a K-Dron you'll understand why. Each of these strange polyhedrons has eleven multifaceted sides and a diamond-shaped face with a 45° angle of inclination. This means K-Drons are symmetrical and asymmetrical, concave and convex. Confused? So are we and we just wrote that.

Intermediate


The K-Dron booklet contains three colour-coded difficulty levels: green for easy, yellow for intermediate and orange for aargh my brain is melting. On the off-chance you ever tire of shape-shifting you can even play a special form of mini chess using the spectacularly versatile K-Dron pieces. Who'd have thought a few funny shapes could be so ludicrously entertaining!

Expert


If you're reading this and wondering why we're harping on about such an ostensibly simple little puzzle, consider this: K-Dron costs less than two pints of wallop; it doesn't bleep, flash or deliver an electric shock, and it's barely bigger than a packet of ciggies. And yet every single gadgetmeister here at Firebox HQ is fiddling with theirs as we speak. *Oi, get back to work you lot!* As for you lot, we strongly recommend you get ordering before the whole world goes K-Dron crazy.