A Plethora of Perplexing Pyramid Puzzles

hey guys and welcome back to z3 cubing today we're going to be checking out some cool new pyramid shaped non-wca puzzles from moyu [Music] so around a month back moyu the speedcubing company released this cool little collection of unique new twisty puzzles they're all tetrahedrons so they're shaped like a pyraminx but of course the pyraminx is the only pyramid shaped puzzle in the world cube association meaning that these are all non-wca puzzles i see these as sort of some fun little puzzles that the average cuber might look at and think that they look cool or look fun to solve and so they decide to pick one or two of them up for their collection they're only six dollars each which is pretty affordable and clearly these aren't meant to be taken too seriously they all have this sort of pastel stickerless color scheme to them giving it kind of a beginner-friendly casual look it also has this semi-transparent version on the box but i'm not quite sure where those are available on the box it also says magical pyramid puzzle series so i guess that's the official name for the entire lineup and it also has an individual name for each puzzle so this one is called the bead pyraminx anyway what i think we should do first is kind of give some first impressions of what i think each of these puzzles looks like for example this one i can't imagine a world where this one isn't by far the easiest where you just turn the corners this one looks also pretty easy kind of like a pyraminx duo let's see this one's gonna be kind of in the middle this one looks pretty hard uh maybe like this and then this looks like an easier version of this so this is my prediction of which one will be the easiest and which one will be the hardest but we'll see how they actually rank up as we unbox them so i think it makes most sense to start with the easiest one over here and then we will go in this direction throughout the video so this first one is called the corner twist pyramid and as i open it up here i will mention that i got all these puzzles at the cubicle.com again for just six dollars each and i'll put the links in the description to where you can buy each one be sure and use discount code z3 cubing for five percent off your order so it comes with this little instruction booklet but i highly doubt we're going to be needing this for this puzzle it feels pretty nice in your hands it is relatively light and it's a similar size to the pyraminx maybe a little bit smaller but it definitely does feel compact because it has these kind of curved edges to it so let's do some first turns and see if this is really as easy as i think it is so does it just turn on the corner like this it definitely does and does it turn in any other way nope it's literally just four corners so we can just look at the pink side right here boop boop and then boop it's solved i was gonna give a warning because i'm probably gonna spoil the solutions to many of the puzzles in this video but it looks like i accidentally showed you how to solve this one before i even got around to it the actual turning is very effortless like there's very little friction in there and combined with that nice hard click when you turn aside into place i mean you can pretty much just flick the side and it'll always end up in the right spot it looks like they actually use ball bearings to get that nice snappy feeling like on a lot of old pyraminxes and skewbs and i think that's actually a better choice for this puzzle than magnus because it'll kind of stop the piece in place no matter how much momentum it has unlike magnets which are good for a lot of double turns and continuous moves which obviously you're not gonna be doing any double turns on this because it's always just one move away from being solved so i guess this might be a good puzzle for like a really young kid who just wants to be able to solve something because even if you have no idea what you're doing you're gonna end up accidentally solving it in under a minute anyway let's get on to something a little bit more challenging but not that much more challenging this is the moyu bead pyramid it does also come with an instruction booklet although i'm gonna try and solve all these without using them and what i believe this is is basically the methods pyraminx duo but in a slightly different shape and hopefully with slightly better turning and yeah it seems like that's exactly what this is the turning does feel a little bit better than the methods pyraminx duo although it is a lot less clicky also a lot less clicky than the last movie puzzle we checked out and i think the reason behind that is there's quite a lot of give between these corner pieces and these center pieces which makes for kind of this squishy feeling like it's not reacting to what you're doing fast enough but i think that does allow at least a little bit of corner cutting which is cool it does still have ball bearings but it's nowhere near as snappy as the first one like it won't always snap into place like the first one did i think that's because the turning is nowhere near as effortless or frictionless as the first one which is kind of disappointing but anyway it's not that big of a deal so now that it's scrambled up here's a fun fact even though there are four extra pieces on this puzzle compared to this one which makes it seem like it should be a lot more complicated both of these puzzles can actually always be solved in four moves or less it's pretty obvious how to do that on this one but this one takes a bit more practice but i can actually see that this one can be solved in just three moves so one two and three so with a little bit of practice you can always solve this one in under four moves and it's actually a pretty fun game of logic to work out in your head how to do it most efficiently every time but while we're here i'll give you a bit more of a beginner's method you can do the same thing as on this one and just look at say the three pieces that have yellow on them move them all to the same side like this and then solve the last corner and then you just take a look at where you have two pieces to be swapped like this do a bit of a sledgehammer like this and then it's solved so yeah still a very easy puzzle but not completely trivial like the first one i would say it's good for total beginners who just want the tiniest bit of challenge or maybe even more advanced cubers who want to learn how to solve it optimally every time let's move on to the third puzzle here this is the boomerang pyramid now this is the first puzzle that i'm not exactly sure before opening it exactly how it turns or how difficult it'll be but yeah here's the instruction booklet i can't imagine it'll be that hard just because it has so few pieces on first look it seems like it should turn around the edges but that would be way too easy if just one piece turned at a time so i think it actually turns like this around a corner and a face so that's actually pretty cool it's a very weird look to a turn but yeah i like it it does have a nice little snap into place again not quite as effortless as the first one but not quite as weird and squishy as the second one now if you think about it this shouldn't really be any different than the edges of a pyraminx because it turns around the corners like this and each time it cycles these three edges like this so if you just ignore all the other pieces on a pyraminx but the edges you turn the side and it cycles these three edges so i think you should be able to solve it in exactly the same way anyway i think this is probably scrambled enough so let's start with maybe two pieces together like this and find the other edge piece that goes there there it is so we have one corner solved and there we go now we just have wait we have one edge flipped okay that's not possible on a pyraminx okay that's kind of crazy okay i thought about it for a minute and i think i know what the problem is if we go ahead and look at one of these corner sections that we made and compare it to one of these other pyraminx puzzles you can see that the color scheme is actually wrong we have green and pink here but instead of having blue we have yellow so i think what we have to do is actually redo it but with the right color scheme so we can kind of swap the pieces around like this and then remake the corner section like this so that's the correct color scheme that we wanted it looks like we now have two edges flipped so there's an alg for that let's go ahead and do that a little bit awkward on this puzzle just because of the way that the entire puzzle kind of turns at once but there we go we solved the boomerang pyramid so that was a fun little challenge to figure out how to do if you can already solve the pyraminx this should be easy for you because it's just the edges but with the added little challenge that you have to make sure you get your color scheme correct and i think so far we've actually done really well at ranking these puzzles in terms of difficulty actually if we look at the next puzzle on the list we can kind of see that these go in pairs we have something really simple and then we add a piece in the middle we have something a little bit harder but still simple and then we add a piece in the middle so if that theory is correct then this puzzle the windmill pyraminx should turn exactly the same as the last one but with that added piece in the middle to make it a little bit more difficult so we got our little instruction booklet there and now let's see if this turns like i think it does first off it still does not turn on the edges and yep it turns just like before so it looks like the corner piece moves along with the other pieces just like i thought kind of like on a pyraminx duo except with only the edges of a pyraminx instead of only the corners of a pyraminx i imagine it'll solve pretty much the same way as the pyraminx duo as well meaning that you solve the outer part of the puzzle and then do a sledgehammer to solve the centers so on this puzzle that means you solve the outer part like the boomerang pyraminx just like before and then you solve the centers so let's start with say these two edge pieces right here i think the color scheme is wrong so we have to kind of correct it like this and now we can get that third edge piece here kind of like this and now we can solve this last layer so we do the algorithm to flip two edges from the pyraminx kind of like this and then hopefully the center should be in an arrangement that okay that's that's not what i was expecting so on the pyraminx duo the only arrangement possible is having two flip like this and two flip like this uh there is no possible arrangement where there's three flips so i'm not exactly sure how to do this but my best guess would be something like this well that didn't solve it but it did get it into this arrangement that i was just talking about so we can just do a single sledgehammer here oh wait no that messes up the edges though okay i think if we just keep doing sledgehammers it might fix it though uh there we go now the puzzle is solved okay so yeah if you just have two of them swapped like that you just do three sledgehammers and that solves it otherwise if you have just three of them messed up and one of them solved the way you actually do it is you hold the solved one on the left and then you just repeat r u r prime u and do that a couple times until it should solve the puzzle so yeah still pretty easy you just have to remember those two different last four center cases other than that it's pretty much the same thing as the boomerang pyraminx but if you're gonna buy either one of these i would definitely go with this one because i think that is just the right level of challenge for most cubers anyway let's move on to our second to last puzzle this is the maple leaf pyramid and i hope this will hold up to my ranking system and be a little bit harder than the last one so we got our little instruction booklet and let's check out the puzzle itself now on first glance this thing reminds me of the chi clover pyraminx a puzzle that actually turns on the edges like this now what i've noticed in this unboxing so far is that all these moyu puzzles have turned on the corners and not on the edges so let's see if that holds up does not seem to turn on the edges it does in fact turn on the corners so it looks like this is a puzzle that has edges just like on the previous view but it also has these corners instead of having the centers now obviously it doesn't look identical but do you see any resemblance between the way this turns on the corners and the way a pyraminx turns on the corners they each have three edges and one center the only difference between these two puzzles is actually the tips it's literally just a pyraminx minus the tips in fact if we take all the tips off of a pyraminx making a puzzle that's also known as the tetraminx then it may be hard to tell but these two puzzles are actually functionally identical the exact same number of pieces moving in exactly the same way so yeah if you know how to solve a pyraminx then you'll know how to solve this one as well the turning is just as good as the last few in fact maybe even a little bit better the only real thing is that it is a little bit awkward just because these pieces sweep out so much area as you're turning them so compared to a pyraminx you're just trading a little bit of ease of use for cooler looks i mean this thing does look pretty cool anyway let's go ahead and do a quick solve so we can move these two pieces into place around a corner piece i guess we'll just do keyhole because that's easy oh it looks like we got a little bit lucky so we got all these pieces solved and then we have our last layer case right here you can solve it with any pyraminx method but that was the one i chose to use so if you already know how to solve a pyraminx then obviously this won't be much of a challenge for you it's literally just the exact same thing minus the tips but like i said earlier it does look pretty cool so i guess if you're getting the whole collection of cool looking moyu pyraminx puzzles then yeah i mean this one is definitely a cool one to add to the collection and when it comes to my ranking it seems like i'm still doing a pretty good job obviously a pyraminx with edges and corners is definitely going to be harder than just the edges of a pyraminx and even though someone who just knows how to solve a pyraminx might say that this is the order because there's more new stuff to learn on this one i would actually say that for an absolute beginner it would actually go like this because adding in centers to an all-edge pyramid like this i think would actually be easier for a beginner to figure out than adding these pyraminx corners which actually changed the way that you solve the entire thing so yeah i think starting from this cube it would be easier to work up to this one than it would be to this one okay now what if you want to start with edges and then add in centers and corners well i think that that's actually what this final cube is exactly this is the triangle pyramid and this should actually be the hardest cube of them all because it's kind of a combination of all those other features that we saw before it has edges it has corners and it has centers and it turns on the corner just like this this should be the only cube that's definitively harder than the pyraminx in my opinion but it shouldn't be that much harder we should be able to solve it with a combination of techniques from the previous few puzzles the turning of this puzzle is actually a little bit better than most of them in this video in part i think just because of the less awkward shape of the pieces like nothing gets in your way as you're trying to finger trick like this there is a little bit of corner cutting and the ball bearing snap is decent this might be an example of a puzzle that i would rather have magnets in though so let's go ahead and do a full solve we'll start like a pyraminx so how about over here where we already have one of these flipped edges in place and then we can do the other one like this so now we have some one flip going and we can take a look at our last layer case which goes something like this now we have all these corners in place and we can do the last layer case of the pyraminx kind of like this and now all we have left is the centers we have the same double swap case as on the pyraminx duo so we should just be able to do a bunch of sledgehammers and get everything solved okay that was actually pretty quick but i guess that's because of my knowledge of the pyraminx and the fact that i already figured out exactly how this works before i started solving it based on the combination of the other puzzles beforehand so if we go ahead and do some moves like this what i'm wondering is if it's possible to get that last four center case where you have three of them swapped and one of them solved but i did the algorithm for it and actually swapped this center piece too so i'm thinking it might not be possible i'm just gonna solve the puzzle a few more times and see if i can get it all right so i did a bit more solving and it seems like this is the only last center case that i'm getting which is a good sign because that means there's just less things to memorize and yeah overall i would say this puzzle is definitely my favorite out of the entire six because it's the most challenging but also not too challenging now another fun thing to note is that this puzzle is actually functionally identical to another puzzle called the chi duomo cube yes it's called a cube don't be mad at me but yeah basically the solves in exactly the same way it has edges corners and centers it looks like it should be more complicated because of the way the pieces are arranged and yeah the turning is definitely a lot more awkward because of the overlapping pieces i like the design of this one a lot better but in fact they are just the exact same thing but personally i would definitely go with this one because it's both cheaper and it's a lot easier to turn now for a quick little summary of these puzzles this one is ridiculously easy this one is just adding centers to that this one is a little bit harder it's just the edges of a pyraminx this one is adding centers to that this one is a little bit harder the edges and corners of a pyraminx and this one is adding centers to that so it kind of goes in these pairs like this but yeah in the beginning i would say that those were some informed but also very lucky guesses that meant i got the order of difficulty exactly right overall my favorites would definitely be the ones with centerpieces especially these two more complicated ones although also this one if you don't already have a pyraminx duo i would recommend these three especially especially this one is my favorite but if you want something stupidly simple these two are good options and this one this one just looks cool anyway i'll put links to where you can buy all these in the order that i showed them in the video in the description down below be sure and get them at the cubicle.com and use discount code z3 cubing for five percent off any or all of these at just six dollars each i think you should definitely check them out and if you can only buy one well buy the hardest one it's definitely my favorite and it's a very nice level of challenge not too difficult anyway that's pretty much it for my unboxing of these cool new non-wca moyu puzzles i really hope you all enjoyed let me know down in the comments if you like this style of unboxing and you want to see more like it in the future and that's pretty much it i'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Z3Cubing

Views: 622,402

Keywords: rubiks cube, rubiks, cube, cubing, cubes, puzzle, puzzle cube, magic puzzle, magic cube

Id: 58Cd5g8xigo

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020