IcoSoKu is designed by Andrea Manini.
The name is a word combination of icosahedron and Sudoku.
Icosahedron refers to the geometrical form of the puzzle.
The puzzle is also a number puzzle similar to Sudoku, hence its name.
The puzzle consists of a blue icosahedron with yellow corners, 12 yellow pegs and 20 triangular, white plates.
The pegs are numbered from 1 to 12. A peg can be inserted on each corner of the icosahedron.
The white plates resemble dominoes, as they have a number between zero and three on each corner.
The white plates can be attached to the triangular sides of the Icosahedron.
The game can be played in two ways:
In the easy mode, the yellow pegs and the white pegs can be placed as desired.
In the difficult variant, first the yellow pegs are distributed by chance on the Icosahedron.
Then the white plates have to be placed.
There is only one rule to consider in both variants:
Each corner of a white plate points to a corner / yellow peg.
Therefore, each yellow peg is surrounded by five white corners.
The sum of these five white corners has to equal the number on the peg.
If you take a close look at the white plates,
then you notice that certain combinations of the corner numbers are completely missing:
zero, two, three
zero, one, three
three, three, one
two, two, one
three, three, two two, two, three
On the other hand, other combinations are three times present:
zero, one, two
zero, two, one
one, two, three
one, three, two
Other combinations appear only once:
zero, zero, zero
one, one, one
two, two, two
three, three, three
one, zero, zero
two, zero, zero
three, zero, zero
one, one, zero
two, two, zero
three, three, zero
It appears that plate corners with the value three are often used for pegs with high numbers.
Pegs which have a number smaller than five are almost exclusively surrounded by plate corners with a zero or one.
The time for playing this puzzle is about 45 minutes. The difficulty level of the puzzle
is like a moderate or difficult Sudoku challenge. But compared to other puzzles,
I would classify IcoSoKu as easy, as it is not really necessary to develop own ideas to master the puzzle.
I personally like IcoSoKu more than Sudoku.
One reason is that I do not need to worry about a new challenge.
It is simply sufficient to relocate the yellow pegs.
On the other hand, every Sudoku player knows the situation that he chose a wrong number
and has problems to recognize the correct numbers after correction.
By contrast, a wrong number at IcoSoKu can be simply corrected by detaching the wrongly placed plates.
In my point of view, this is the ideal puzzle for Sudoku lovers.
Due to its unusual look, it looks quite interesting and offers a different kind of optical aesthetic.