ShengShou Phoenix Megaminx

Tedious megaminx mod

Build quality is fine, it works, it’s whatever. My complaint is with the solve itself, which is tedious. If this is your first shape mod, you don’t have an axis cube or mastermorphix or mirror cube or anything like that, you might be blown away a bit — the shape changes! Wow! What will they think of next? But I’ve got a few like that. You get used to it — the corner isn’t a new shape, it’s just a different way than colors of telling if you’ve got it in the right orientation. So that’s all fine, I’m not opposed to a mirror cube or etc, in concept. But the problem here is that the pieces are very small, and distinct, but very very similar. So it’s quite likely you’ll get to the last layer and have some impossible parity. What this means (well, depending on the parity; I don’t want to spoil the solve for you) is that two seemingly identical pieces aren’t, and need to be swapped; OR two actually identical pieces need to be swapped, arbitrarily. It’s fine, as a concept, but the reality of solving the puzzle is just so fiddly and tedious. It’s the only one I skip when I scramble the whole collection, because I just can’t be bothered to go through it again. If you’re curious about this kind of mod, I would recommend going for a cube shapemod — there are plenty of them with the same gimmicks, but less tiny pieces.

Fun

Nice twist on the megamix. Love the colors. Wish we could pick them out. Nice cube to add to the collection.

Great Puzzle

It’s a great shape morph puzzle. The mechanics of the puzzle are excellent; it’s smooth and very easy to turn. I’ve had it for about a week, and I love the patterns I’ve made. I highly recommend it.