Twisting Puzzles
Bandaged Cube (One Face)

Bandaged Cube - (One Face)

Bandaging a cube means sticking together some of the cubies. This creates some interesting sticker patterns and, because the number of faces that you can turn is restricted, the cube is quite tricky to solve.

This is a home-made version. The cube was a mini speed cube from Cube4You. The bandaging pattern on the white face is the same as the 'top' layer of a Meffert's bandaged cube. The other layers have no bandaged pieces. The larger stickers were (badly) cut out from sheets of Cubesmith vinyl.

You might think that bandaging one face in the style of a Meffert's bandaged cube would lead to an approach to solving it. That would be an easy mistake to make. With the Meffert's puzzle, having placed the edges, you have only 8 pieces to move around. The approach, if not the solution, lies in cycling 3 or 5 of those pieces around. With this version, there are too many unbandaged pieces to allow the same algorithms to be useful.

The approach that I went for in the end was to solve the bandaged layer first. If you don't, it always seems to catch you out at some point. With the first layer solved, I orient and position the corners of the bottom layer. Then I place the middle edges of the bottom layer. Then I position the edges of the middle layer and untwist them if necessary. Not the easiest puzzle to solve.

Solution