To cut a short story even shorter, I found a laser cutting place a little while ago and got a set of pentominoes and hexominoes cut from acrylic. It's one of those times it really hits me we're living in the future, the fact that I can just draw up a .svg file of whatever polyominoes I want, click a few buttons then a week or so later those exact polyominoes rock up at the house in physical form.
(Actually I was out when they attempted delivery so I had to trail right out the the sorting office, but it's still pretty impressive. That or I'm just easily impressed.) Anyways, here they are:
Just look at all that sticky protective stuff on the perspex - that's on both sides of the pieces, which took an absolute age to manually peel off each individual piece. Worth it though, they're all lovely and pretty and shiny.
Not that you can tell, mind you, thanks to the amazing fuzzy blurriness of my phone camera. I've been meaning to get a proper camera for ages now. But then again I'd been meaning to get polyominoes laser cut since about June so that might be a way off yet. I just have a habit of putting off doing things for no real reason, which isn't good.
What is good however is the way these hexominoes are when you use them. My original set were cut on a CNC routing machine, and as a result have these weird beveled edges thanks to the width of the drill. Which means that when you turn pieces over they look weird, and sometimes pieces just don't comfortably fit together, mainly interlocking pieces with C-pentomino-like indents in them. But these are all nice and precise and fit together flawlessly, it's just so satisfying to sit there building stuff with them. Oh yeah, and they're scaled to 1cm squares too, so I can use that cutting mat to assist with construction. (Not that it helps much clearly, given the amount of patterns I've cocked up due to misaligning things in the past...)
Here's the full set. Hexominoes, pentominoes, and a bunch of little monominoes and dominoes which are useful for marking out pattern boundaries and hole locations and other such things.
Of course the real goal here wasn't just to have a nice spanking new set of hexominoes. Lord no! These were just a test run really, to see what kind of quality the pieces would be and how much everything would cost, stuff like that. But now that I know this works, the plan is to get myself some octominoes made. Never mind that there's not a big enough flat surface in the house to use them on, that's besides the point. Octominoes! Picture it, all done in fluorescent clear plastic so you can see the boundaries between pieces nicely - that's the one flaw with these hexominoes, but I chose a solid colour on purpose so when I eventually make the octominoes they're visually distinct.
And try not to think about how long it'll take to manually remove the scratch-protection sticky business from all 369 octominoes. On both sides.
Oh yeah, almost forgot, here's a couple of little hexomino things, just since I've been playing with the new set quite a bit recently. Here's a better illustration of the 11-hole rectangle from the photo above, because due to a combination of lighting and piece colour you couldn't really see what's going on:
And here's a 5-cell high parallelogram that was a ball-ache to complete. In fact I used a program to place the last 8 pieces in a fit of laziness. It was getting late and I had other stuff to do.
And then I found a bunch of different pattern variations based on a 15x15 square with 15 holes. There's some quite nice challenges here, analogous to the pentominoes in an 8x8 square with 4 holes that you can place wherever. It's hexominoes though so parity constraints mean you can't just stick the holes anywhere, but it still leaves enough room for creativity. Hell, now that I can laser cut stuff I'm thinking about the possibility of making a little tray to hold a 15x15 solution, and 15 monominoes in a very different colour that can be used as a little self-contained puzzle.
Here's three example solutions for you to feast your eyes on, arranged from left to right in increasing order of fiendishness.
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