About two months ago, I reviewed the color version of the Eni Puzzles and at the time I noticed that they had just launched a black and white version, which looked rather interesting. I was recently able to get one of these for review, so keep reading to find out more.

First, a little introduction:

The Eni Puzzles come from South Korea and were invented by JongMan Kim, JeeSoo Kim and Tom Sebazco. They're 3D slide puzzles and you can find them in a variety of sizes and color schemes.  There's no specific goal for these puzzles. The challenge is to recreate any pattern that you can think of.

Eni - Black & White

The Black & White Eni was developed by Tom Sebazco and comes in a unique size, same as the colored "mini", which is 6cm (2.4") in height and 3cm (1.2") in diameter. There are eight rotating discs, each with eight tiles except for one. The missing piece allows the tiles to slide up or down allowing them to move freely and this way, form all kinds of patterns. One of the puzzle's trademarks is the raised contours on the tiles, giving you a better grip to slide them.

Because the puzzle is only in black and white, the patterns that you'll be able to build are much more varied and diverse, not in color obviously, but the contrasting colors will provide a wider range of recognizable designs. I also found it much easier and faster to solve than the color versions. With only two possible colors, it takes much less time to find and get the tiles where you want them, unlike the others where at times would feel a bit tedious to finalize any pattern, because there were eight different colors scattered around.

Trying to come up with different patterns, I realized that it was quite difficult to solve them directly into the puzzle. I figured later that it was much simpler to first design the pattern on a sheet of paper and then, looking at the pattern, solve one disc at a time. This sounds trivial, and it is actually, but I just didn't think of it before.

When you're designing a particular pattern to solve, there's one thing to always keep in mind: Be sure you have 32 black tiles and 31 white (the missing tile is supposed to be white). It actually happened to me a couple of times, when I was designing a pattern and realized that I had more black tiles than the ones available, so I ended up having to improvise. This only happens if the pattern you're trying to make is asymmetrical, though.

For a list of available places to buy, check out this page.

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Closing Comments:

After trying both the color and Black & White Eni Puzzles, I must say that I very much prefer the latter. Making patterns is very easy and fun. The simplicity of the two contrasting colors is visually stunning and much more versatile, while solving-wise it's less time-consuming. If you're a creative type of person, then I recommend getting this version. Great to have around just to fiddle with.

In the future, I would also love to see some other two-color variations - Blue/Orange, for example, which is my favorite color combination.

Update: The company has plans to actually develop new two-color schemes and quite possibly have an assembly kit that'll allow puzzlers to choose their own color combinations. With this in mind, there's really a lot to look forward in the near future, so stay tuned.

More Patterns: