The Creation of the Teraminx

The teraminx. A beast of a puzzle, this is the next step
up from the gigaminx, and is the dodecahedral equivalent of a 7x7 cube. Over 500 pieces, over 700 stickers, and yet
you can buy very cheap ones that work great. It wasn't always like this, though.

On the 26th of February, 2007, a man by the
name of Garrett Dickerson posted to the TwistyPuzzles forum, announcing his intention to build a
gigaminx. Offhandedly, he mentioned that this project
would open up opportunities to create a teraminx as well. Pretty cool idea for a project, but the problem
was that he had no experience whatsoever in puzzle design - or, in fact, any sort of design at all. As a result, after he announced this, he became
very quiet, and the subject was mostly dropped.

He wasn't gone forever though. In December that year, he started a new thread,
announcing that he had since gone to college and taken a course on computer-aided design. This meant that he was able to restart the
project, focusing mostly on the teraminx. People started getting interested, as this
would be a world first.

He estimated that there would be 543 pieces,
which would have made it the most complex twisty puzzle ever made up to that point. A few months later, another member named Danny
announced that he was also working on a teraminx. He had already created the parts in a 3D modelling
program, but he originally intended to cut all the pieces by hand. This...

Wouldn't work. De Foras' 7x7 was created with hand-cut pieces,
and it was posted as a great example for why you shouldn't make puzzles that way. Eventually, he caved, and started asking for
how to get pieces 3D printed. Brief interlude: Until the advent of Shapeways,
the main way that custom puzzles were created was by sending a file containing the digital
versions of each unique piece to a 3D printing service.

They would send you back the 3D printed pieces,
or "masters". You would then have to create a plastic mold
for the pieces, and then individually cast every piece. This isn't done so much these days, as 3D
printing is now cheaper and higher quality, but for a while it was the only way to create
truly custom puzzles. Fairly soon, Danny had created the designs,
and sent them off to be converted into masters.

The masters came back really well, and it
looked like everything was going perfectly. But by this time, he was not the only person
working on a teraminx: Andrew Cormier, otherwise known as "Drewseph", had started work. He had received molding equipment, and was
working on the designs of the pieces. July 2008 came around, and Danny had cast
about 100 pieces.

It looked like he was going to complete the
teraminx first; however, Drewseph was known for being incredibly fast at casting, often
casting the same amount in just 2 hours. His pieces had arrived, too. All he needed was to create molds, and then
it would really be a race. Danny had become rather quiet on this front
due to other puzzle projects, however, so it looked like Drewseph was going to win.

After just a few days, he started work on
the molds. Various technical difficulties followed, but
he managed to finish them pretty quickly, and start on the actual casting. Just one day later, over 300 pieces had been
cast, and he was able to assemble an entire face. Another day followed, and at exactly 11 PM eastern, on August the 8th, he finished casting.

It was nearly complete. Three hours later... The reaction was swift. On the 21st of August, 2008, he finished stickering,
and uploaded a video showing it off.

Garrett and Danny both offered congratulations
for the finished project, and it was widely regarded as the best puzzle of 2008. Garrett and Danny never finished their teraminxes,
incidentally, but Drewseph managed to make a smaller, better quality version, and a few
years later, Cube4You started selling a mass-produced version. Today of course, you can get Cube4You, MF8,
and Shengshou mass-produced teraminxes for under $100. You can even get a mass-produced petaminx,
and I wouldn't be surprised if another one comes along soon.

It's nice to see how it started, though, as
it's a good reminder that no puzzle just started existing at some moment in time, and to be
patient when waiting on a puzzle that's being produced..