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Product Number: 140
How much: £9.00
Where can I buy one: The Mad Cow Company.co.uk

Is it immoral to review a DVD without watching it all the way to the end? Is it unfair to cast a verdict on a CD by only listening to a few tracks? Ultimately the answer is yes and I’ve always felt that the best way to review any medium is it fully invest myself until the end and to try and approach it from every possible angle. This style hasn’t exactly rung true for 'The Quadrilateral', which has successfully managed to resist everything myself and Marie have thrown at it.


The basic premise is simple. Four rings are connected by a range of colored strings and your goal is to free them from the other rings. Although this sounds pretty basic the strings themselves aren’t big enough to fit the rings under and all of the rings are exactly the same size so there’s no trickery to be had there. The strings’ short lengths also mean if you try to move the rings too much they’ll become tangled and you’ll be unable to perform any more twists and turns.

Other attempts we’ve tried have been too numerous to explain here and even when doing a quick search for “Quadrilateral Solutions” all I managed to find were a bunch of Maths equations. Even Wikipedia, the always unreliable source of public lies was unable to help me. It’s no wonder the creators at The Mad Cow Company have branded it an ‘Extreme’ difficulty rating.


This wouldn’t be the first time a puzzle has landed on my desk and then caused unbridled frustration. When the Bedlam Cube arrived I talked about how we’d keep trying and how eventually we’d solve it. The always nice Danny Bamping (founder of Bedlam Puzzles) even told us to drop him an email when we solved it. Well I hope he doesn’t think we’re being rude and not writing back as we’ve still been unable to solve it…


The surprising thing about this frustration is that it actually acts as a mark of quality. The Quadrilateral may have eluded our grasps (we tried so hard that some of the paint even came off the rings) but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad gift. Unless you’re someone that walks away at the slightest hint of a challenge then you’ll find some way to gain some enjoyment our of it, and if all else fails you can always use it for a Hoopla tournament.