About a year ago I built a bandaged Square-1 variant with single, double, and triple width pieces. But I didn't unveil it due to endless problems with the laser-cut tiles I had used instead of stickers. They were too thick, they snagged on the puzzle's movements, they picked up fingerprints, they flaked off, and the glue kept showing through the tiles.

I recently built a second one (left) a stickered it with thinner PVC tiles I built on my 3D printer. Sorry, I neglected to use the same color scheme on the two puzzles (built a year apart) so it's hard to make direct comparisons.

As an added solving challenge I used an asymmetrical bandaging scheme. At the start, the green side is bandaged so the triple-width pieces are adjacent, allowing movement along only two cuts. The yellow side is bandaged with matching pairs diagonally opposite each other, allowing movement along three cuts.

At first it seems like the puzzle can't get very mixed up because most of the available cuts are at 90-degree angles from each other. But there are enough 30-degree angles to allow an occasional turn, at which point the puzzle can get really tough. You can reach the point where there's only one turnable cut per face, and it's hard to avoid getting stuck in perpetual loops.

Even simple rearrangements can be difficult because of the bandaging.

lovely! This puzzle has been on my mind for quite a while.. actually since I got my first Sq1 back in 07

are you the first person to make this puzzle?

That looks really nice, and such a good idea too!

I haven't seen it done before, but I'm sure lots of people have thought of it. It's so simple that I've often wondered why it wasn't a common beginner mod, but I guess it just hadn't been popularized yet.

Very Nice,

but i have a question about this great puzzle, how did you put the Glass or fiber glass on the top of the sticker without showing any glue or bond on it????

There's no separate sticker; the back sides of the tiles are painted.

For the first set of tiles I painted colors onto the back side of 1.6mm clear acrylic sheets, then laser cut the sheets into tiles. The colored back side of the tile shows through when the protective film is peeled away. The acrylic sheet in this picture has been painted red on the back side. You can see the red color through the sheet when I peel away the blue film. (The blue film is always discarded.)

Those acrylic tiles had all sorts of problems. They were too thick and uncomfortable when using the puzzle. Some tiles were discolored by the glue, so I had to take them off and make new ones with an added layer of primer to protect the paint.

I gave up on the acrylic tiles. Even after resolving the problems with the glue, they were still too thick and they picked up fingerprints.

For my second version I used a 3D printer that builds parts from thin layers of PVC about 168μm thick. I built a sheet of clear tiles 0.3 mm thick. Before painting they look like this...

At first the 3D-printed tiles are clear and colorless, but I painted the back side of the tiles and then attached the painted side to the puzzle so you could see the color through the tiles.