This puzzle design was invented by me on October, 31th, 2003 and forgotten by me for a long time. While browsing throungh my folders I found it (again) and want to present it to you.

Again, with this puzzle design I wanted to start over with the subject of "ball pyramids". For this time I recognized that all the ball pyramids that I have seen so far are "just" a matter of "finding the places for the puzzlepieces" to get the result. In comarison to that, using the grid of CUBES in 3D-space there already exists a huge variety of puzzles that come apart only after several (mostly linear) moves. The number of moves you have to do to be able take out the first/second/... piece is counted as "level". This means that a puzzle of "level 7.5.4" uses 7 moves to get the first piece out, then it needs 5 more moves to take out the second piece and 4 moves to get the third piece out. The remaining pieces mostly then fall apart and it is not worth mentioning the other moves.

Having this in mind I posed myself the question: Is there already a ball pyramid that does not fall apart with the first move*, but needs more than one move to take out the first piece?
So the goal was to invent a level-X ball-pyramid with X greater than one!

*: there are ball-pyramids or assemblies of ball-pieces that hold together but fall apart with a single rotation/twist


According to the dense packing of balls in 3D-space I did not succeed in designing a puzzle with ball-pieces where one piece could be moved/rotated but cannot be removed. Therefore I introduced small bent wire pieces to hold other puzzle pieces. The result was a Level-3 Ball-Pyramid which only consists of 10 balls (which are combined to just three pieces)! Here a picture of my first prototype:

You would like to see the pieces itself and the asselbling-process? Ok, here it is:

For sure the puzzle itself is far away from being difficult, but I think it is a nice 2-3 minute think-about-puzzle with an interesting and hopefully new "twist" in ball-pyramid puzzles.