Hail Columbus Review

Puzzle	Hail Columbus
Artist	Candy Thun
Type	Trick
Catalog Picture

This is a circa 2004 trick puzzle by Candy Thun that I was recently lucky enough to puzzle. This puzzle has three-dimensional pieces (the ships are standing up relative to the rest of the puzzle). The challenge is:

So right off the bat, this is in the there is only one "winning" combination puzzle. This one took me quite a while to get my mind around from when it was loaned out to me until I finished it. For what it is worth--and I don't think this is too much of a hint--the final fit while definitely having that "this is right feel", was much loser than I would have expected. Which may have been why I found this so hard.

One of the things this puzzle helped underscore for me, especially when taken in context with some of the other one-solution trick puzzles I've done now is that a lot of the puzzle is the mental play to understand the challenge and bound the solution. For example in this one what does it mean to have the "Santa Maria reach the new world first"? What are the implications of that? Do you re-arrange the map in some way? Put Santa Maria somewhere particular? Etc?

As trick puzzles go, the fit issue made this harder for me than other similarly rated puzzles. Though some of the problem may have been that for about two or so weeks I hadn't found all of the places where the puzzle pieces could swap. Actually, of any problem I've ever had with trick puzzles with the exception of Nessie (every piece can swap almost) my hardest challenge has been finding the swap points which are hidden very well usually.