Parquet is a great design from Tsunetaro Yamanaka, also known as Surface and came from Brilliant Puzzles.

This unusual wooden puzzle is made with eight dissimilar pieces, comprised by 24 cubes in different colors that interlock in a mesh pattern, creating a striking visual appearance. It measures 14 x 14cm (5.5" x 5.5"), so it's a bit bigger than your average puzzle.

Taking the puzzle apart is relatively easy, because the pieces follow a logical perpendicular pattern, but once you separate them it's a lot harder to put them back into their original state. The pieces are basically a wooden bar with four indentations and cubes glued at different positions.

Now, after solving the puzzle, which took no more than an hour, I discovered upon checking the Brilliant Puzzles' website that the color pattern was quite different than mine. I wouldn't have mind so much if it weren't for the different pieces on both puzzles, supposedly the same. With this in mind, I took a look at the solution sheet provided with the puzzle and was able to confirm that three of the eight pieces had a different configuration: two had only two cubes and another one had five. Knowing that in the solution, all pieces have a different 3-cube arrangement, it's clear where those extra two in the 5-cube piece belong to make all pieces having the same number of cubes.

(Click to Enlarge)

I could have just tried to fix the puzzle by removing the glue and put them back into their original arrangement, but as I'm sure you are aware, it's no easy picnic trying to remove glue from wood without ruining the whole puzzle, and since I don't have a shop with proper tools, I prefer to leave it like that... After all, it still has a solution, which just happens to be completely different from the original. I wonder if I can still call this a Tsunetaro Yamanaka puzzle, because as far as I'm concerned, this is not the same puzzle he designed.

The Parquet puzzle is available at Brilliant Puzzles for about $12 USD.

Closing Comments:

If you're willing to overlook the fact that the puzzle is different from the original design, this is still a great looking puzzle and I liked its concept, in that it's totally different from what I'm used to see in assembly puzzles... And if this happens to be a manufacturing error, I can be in the possession of one of a kind specimen.