Dayan Bermuda Cube

Dayan Bermuda Cube - Earth

Concept

The Bermuda Earth is the third puzzle in the Bermuda Cube series, produced by Dayan (after Mercury and Venus, in case you were wondering). It was produced in 2011 as a set of 8 puzzles, after the 8 (known) planets in our solar system.

The Earth variant has 3 kind of faces: standard 3x3x3 faces on white, yellow and blue; big triangles on the green and red faces and a fisher face on orange. The big triangles result in bandaging, which gives the puzzle its unique look and solving strategy.

Personal experience

Difficulty

I don't consider the Earth variant to be that difficult. I don't have any other planets in my collection yet, but I surely want to give them a go! I read some articles online and found that Earth is amongst the more easy variants, together with Mercury and Venus. The harder ones are Jupiter, Uranus... It seems like the puzzle becomes more complicated while moving away from the sun.

Solving experience

I solved the puzzle with the orange face on top, which seems logical to me since the orange fishered face doesn't show any kind of bandaging. I managed to solve the whole puzzle up to the last (orange) layer, relying purely on intuition. I've done it many times now but I couldn't say for sure that I can explain clearly what I'm doing. I have some big steps in my head which I go through one at a time, but if you're used to using intuition with twisty puzzles, this shouldn't be that hard.

I was a bit stuck at first with the last layer due to the bandaging of the green and red face. After some thinking and trial-and-error, I managed to come up with the right set-up moves to solve it as I would solve a normal 3x3x3 last layer. It takes a lot of unbandaging, but the familiar algorithms remain the same.

This is why I don't consider the Earth variant to be a difficult puzzle, since all you need is a little intuition and 3x3x3 algorithms.

Nevertheless, I enjoy the concept and this is the only bandaging puzzle in my collection (if you don't consider the Octo-Star to be of such kind). I'll make sure to get some other variants because I believe there's a lot of potential to make a really difficult puzzle by giving a couple of faces a bandaging character in the right way.

Source: http://twistypuzzles.com/

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