For the 2006 Christmas presents Jürg played around with making Swiss Flags into a puzzle - since most of the kids we give Christmas presents to are Swiss.
Three versions were made:
For the first puzzle I went with traditional jigsaw pieces to make a simple puzzle for the junger kids.
If we keep the pieces square and make all the sides having an identical shape, so that all pieces fit with all pieces, we can see that we need 20 square pieces total. My first question was whether there are 20 different pieces. Below you can see a list of all possible pieces, starting with the corner pieces, then the side pieces and finally all possible interior pieces.
As you can see there are only 18 pieces total, and only 4 corner pieces (2 of which are also mirror images of each other - so there are really only 3 different corner pieces). However we need a total of 8 corner pieces to make the puzzle work. Hence you will need to use 2 copies of all corner pieces.
With the edge pieces we are lucky - there are just 8 as we need them.
There are however 6 interior pieces and we need to select just 4 of them. I choose to leave out 0011 and 0101, but many other choices are also possible.
The puzzle is simple to solve, there are 1000s of solutions.Flag's #2 and #3 designs are based on a Swiss Cross made up of little Swiss Crosses. As you can see on the right for #2 a base of 3x3 and for #4 a base unit of 4x4 Swiss Crosses was selected.
Thus Flag #2 is made up of 45 small Swiss Cross units, and Flag #3 of 80 units.
The next question then becomes - what kind of pieces can one make using 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 base Swiss
Cross units.
Karin was looking for a gift for people who helped rescue Toastmaster clubs in trouble, so for the production of Swiss Flag #2, we made them out of red and white acrylic and swapped the middle - thus we got a "Club Rescue Puzzle" variant.