The Dragon’s Tail is a wooden brain teaser from Grand Masters, Professor Puzzle’s collection inspired by traditional puzzles from the East. It is made up of twenty-seven wooden pieces joined together which, when unfolded, look like a dragon’s tail. The challenge is to fold them back up to form a compact cube.

• BrandProfessor Puzzle
• SeriesGrand Masters
• TypeFolding puzzle
• MaterialWood
• Pieces27
• Difficulty“Sage” level (Grand Masters scale)

How it works

Undoing the cube takes seconds: you simply unfold the chain. The hard part comes afterwards, because each piece is attached to the next and cannot be placed on its own; any twist affects the whole section that follows. You have to think about the whole rather than each piece in isolation, and it is common for an attempt that seemed to be going well to force you to undo a good part of the work.

The Grand Masters collection

Professor Puzzle presented this series as a tribute to wooden puzzles from the Eastern tradition, and accompanies each model with a legend about its origin. The collection uses its own difficulty scale, ranging from “Philosopher”, the most approachable, to “Grandmaster”, the most demanding; the Dragon’s Tail carries the “Sage” label. The dragon, a figure linked in Chinese culture to emperors and good fortune, gives the puzzle its name and theme.