My father just came to Singapore, and he brought with him a 4x4x4 Rubik's Cube (aka Rubik's Revenge) and a Megaminx. The more interesting one is the Megaminx because it is not a cube. I have played with cubes from 1x1x1 (ahem!) all the way to a 5x5x5 but I have not seen nor touched a dodecahedron-shaped puzzle before.

It is a 12-sided puzzle with a different colour on each face. There are altogether 12 sides to turn (just like a Rubik's cube has 6 sides to turn) and each side can be turned in intervals of 72 degrees. There is a centre on each face which is immobile, so it is similar to a 3x3x3 or a 5x5x5 cube. Excluding centres, there are together 2 types of pieces: corners and edges. Each corner contains 3 colours and each edge contains 2 colours. Each edge does not seem like an edge actually because it is actually made up of 2 triangles (the points of the star on each face) jointed together. To solve the Megaminx, you have to make sure that all the pieces on each face are of the same colour.

It can be quite confusing and intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it, solving is easy. You will definitely need to know how to solve a 3x3x3 Rubik's cube to solve this puzzle, and it's better to know at least 2 methods (the First Two Layers (F2L) and the Block methods) so that you can solve it easily. You don't really need to know how to solve 4x4x4 or bigger cubes to solve the Megaminx.

I took around 2 hours on my first try, excluding dinner time. Now it is ok already, I can take less than 10 minutes to solve. It is more troublesome than a Rubik's cube because firstly, you have to deal with 5 corners at a time, as compared to the Rubik's because it only has 4 corners. After solving the F2L on the Megaminx, you are faced with the F2L again, twice! So you are doing F2L 3 times in total. In both times, you have 1 hand tied behind your back because you cannot mess up what you have achieved earlier.

Solving the last layer is the most troublesome. Because the formulae used for the Rubik's are useless in the Megaminx, I have to develop my own method. On my first try, I got myself confused when solving the last layer because I had to memorise the way I 'messed up' the puzzle so that I could 'unmess' it back, but my brain could not store so many things. So in the end I messed up the cube partially so I had to redo the last few steps. But eventually, I managed to solve the puzzle.

For those who want to try the Megaminx, I suggest you go ahead and solve the Rubik's first. If you know how to solve already, go and figure out how the last layer works, because you will need the idea before you can solve the last layer of the Megaminx.

Oh yeah, in its 'solved' state, the Megaminx is actually very nice.