Combining Discovery sets
10-tile Tantrix Discovery sets can be combined as many times as you like to produce ever bigger puzzles. You should treat tile 1 of a second set as tile 11, tile 2 as tile 12, and so on. However many sets you combine, the numbers on the back still show you the colour of loop to go for, e.g. with 4, 14, 24, 94 (and even 999994!) tiles, the solution is a red loop.
For more details of Tantrix Discovery sets, please click here to open our products page in a new window, but please read the "How challenging is it?" section further down this page before going out and buying lots of sets.
Please note that this challenge is only possible with multiple 10-tile Discovery sets. Although there are Tantrix Discovery puzzles up to no less than 30 tiles in a Tantrix Game Pack, they use 30 unique tiles so they are not the same puzzles as you would get by combining three identical Discovery sets. Only the first ten tiles in the Game Pack can be combined with Discovery sets for this challenge. Tantrix Xtreme sets cannot be combined in quite the same way either.
Claiming a new record
After Clive Fraser found theoretical infinite solutions (see below), we tightened up the conditions for accepting real-tile records. Long ribbon-like solutions are much easier to construct than more solid solutions, so in order to count towards this record, solutions must be reasonably square like Michael's solution above. To define this more precisely, if the longest dimension of the solution is L tiles, the other dimension must be no less than 30% of L along at least 75% of the length of the solution.
To claim a record if you live in the UK or Ireland, you need to send a photo or scan of real tiles, with all tiles in the solution shown on the same picture, to Tantrix UK Ltd, 119 Cedar Road, Croydon, CR0 6UJ, or email it to julia@tantrix.co.uk.
The UK & Ireland record holder at the end of each calendar year will receive an additional Discovery set in the format of their choice as a prize if they have broken the record during that year. This is only a token prize, because we do not want to unduly encourage people to spend lots of money on multiple Discovery sets just to break the record, nor do we want to tempt people to send in computer-produced solutions and claim them as their own, thus spoiling the fun for everybody else.
How challenging is it?
You will need to master most of the important Tantrix Discovery concepts in order even to do the first ten loops or so. After that, the puzzles do get harder if you obey the conditions described above, but they get harder quite gradually.
Michael's 120 (done the hardest possible way because it almost a perfect square) is a great achievement, but now that the main record has reached this high a level, we do not feel that it would be right to encourage people to go out and buy lots of Discovery sets just to create bigger and bigger records. You will get far better long-term value if you buy a Tantrix Game Pack instead - its many puzzles, from simple to almost impossible, and the multi-player Tantrix game should provide you with challenging fun for years to come!
For more details of the Tantrix Game Pack and where to obtain one, please click here to open our products page in a new window.
Having said that, going for the Discovery record can still be very satisfying (and solutions like Michael's can be quite a work of art!), but if you want to try to build an even bigger record, we would suggest trying to borrow sets from friends before going out and buying lots of your own. This advice only applies to the main British record because some of the regional and age group records (see the table above) are still very accessible with only a limited number of sets - indeed, there are no Welsh or Irish records at all yet!
