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After playing with octominoes for a bit, returning to the trusty ol' heptomino set is a strange feeling indeed. All the pieces are so tiny and simple in comparison, and suddenly 108 feels like such a reasonable, manageable number.
I made this, which has the maximum possible symmetry for a heptomino pattern.

Fig. 1: 28x28 with 28 holes.

This was a surprisingly painless solve too (although anything would feel that way after octominoes) - the last pieces all fitted into place on practically the first attempt and the whole solve couldn't have taken much more than half an hour. (And now there's an awful idea: speed-solving polyominoes!)

And here's some assorted hexomino things from 2019 that never made it onto the site because they weren't particularly challenging or interesting.

But these are the lengths you gotta go to when you've been too busy recently to do any interesting polyomino stuff but don't want to completely abandon the blog.

34x87 Octomino Rectangle

How to create a 34x87 rectangle with Octominoes (a handy guide)

Step 1: Solve 90% of a 37x84 rectangle, then wonder why there's so much space left over and not enough pieces to fill it (37x84 = 3108, which is slightly overshooting the octominoes' 2952+6 total area.)

Step 2: Despair for a little bit. Even with a physical set of pieces I find ways to screw things up.

Step 3: Salvage a nice big chunk from the starting corner of the failed solution (the corner where all the scariest, hardest to work with pieces live), and use this as the basis for a new rectangle with the correct dimensions this time...

Fig. 1: Success!