Kanoodle Duplexity Review and Answer Key

I picked up Kanoodle Duplexity quite a number of years ago, and I have finally put together an answer key for these puzzles. I wanted to share that with you today, along with a brief review of the puzzle itself. 

Kanoodle Duplexity is "a two-tone test of logic and reasoning". It contains 28 magnetic tiles, 200 challenge cards, instructions, and a portable carrying case. The object of the game is to completely fill a challenge card with the appropriate magnetic tiles. 

The carrying case has a nice handle, but it is heavy and a bit difficult to open. There is a little hole on the bottom side that you can push your finger into to aid in opening, but it is still tough.

The challenge cards slide into a slot in the bottom front. This makes for a nice place to store the cards. But there is a little lip that catches some of the cards and makes it hard to get all of them out. (I suppose the little hole in the bottom might come in handy here too!)

The inside top of the case has an area where you can store your tiles. The inside bottom is the play area. This is where you will put your selected challenge card and proceed to play.

The magnetic tiles themselves are a bit flimsy and very thin. This makes it hard to manipulate them when you're trying to solve a challenge. Fingernails come in handy here! 

Each tile has two colors on it. Some of them are 'doubles' and have the same color twice. There are 7 colors total: red, green, blue, orange, yellow, purple, and gray. Each color has one double tile and a tile with each other color on it. For example, for the color green, you will find a green/green, green/yellow, green/purple, green/orange, green/gray, green/blue, and a green/red. This means that there are only seven tiles with any given color on it, and because of the double tile, only 8 squares on any given challenge card that can be of that color. This becomes important later.

So let's quickly walk through a challenge...

I picked challenge card #117. It has a unique shape, so it is quite easy. First place your card on the magnetic play area, then sort out the tiles with the colors that you need. In this case, you will work with purples, yellow, and grays. Leave all the other tiles up on the storage area. There are only 4 gray tiles in this challenge, so take a moment to consider them. You can see that I have decided to place the yellow/gray tile in the bottom left. This is the only spot where the yellow/gray tile can go. (Sorry about the quality of the photo. The oranges and yellows are very close in color here, but not as bad on the game itself.) Next consider where the gray/gray tile might fit and how the other gray tiles would work around it.

There isn't much to it after that. The rest of the colors will pretty much place themselves. I did pick an easy challenge and there are MUCH, MUCH harder ones in the bunch, but you get the basic idea.

Also note on this challenge, in the lower left, you can place the yellow/yellow and the yellow/purple tiles in two different ways.

In the answer key, I just went with one possible answer for each challenge. There are many challenges where this 2 tile rotation will be possible, both offering a solution.

One other thing to note, the instructions claim that the puzzles get harder the higher up the challenge number. This is simply NOT the case. Any of the large rectangular puzzles (7x8, 6x7, etc) tend to be tricksy, but all the the smaller rectangular puzzles (4x5 etc) are easy. And if the puzzle has a shape or a missing bit out of the center...it is even easier! So if you have picked this puzzle up for your kids, encourage them to do the small rectangles and the crazy shaped ones first. They should have no trouble with those, even the very last level is super simple!

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Kanoodle Duplexity says it uses your spatial reasoning and problem solving skills. I would agree. But it also tests your patience, as there are some problems with some of the challenges. 

The biggest issue that I found was that some of the challenges are unsolvable. I think this may be due to editing errors on the cards. This game needed some better beta testing before being released!

For most of the problem cards, it comes down to the number of colored squares. Remember I mentioned earlier that there can only be 8 squares of any one color on a card? This is the problem that most of them have. Both challenge cards 34 and 35 show 9 gray squares. It is not possible to cover 9 gray squares with only 8 gray tile squares.

Here is a list of the challenges with that issue:

34, 35, 44, 51, 59, 95, 120 and 172

We (my daughter and I) also ran into a troubles solving some of the other cards. I do believe that some of these have editing issues as well, but most of them may just be extra hard! 

Here is a list of the challenges that we could not solve:

9, 48, 97, 144, 169, 171 and 198

If anyone else solves any of those, please take a photo and send me the answer! I will add it to the answer key.

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For two of the problematic challenges, I came up with a workaround. You can see them below.

Challenge #44:

Challenge #171:

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Finally I offer you the answer key...

Just joking! This is the chicken scratch that Ginny and I jotted down as we solved the challenges. We drew our answers out on graph paper with markers and ended up with 9 pages of kinda crazy stuff! So then it took me a couple years to find the energy to translate and clean everything up into a pdf that is worthy of sharing. And here that is...the real answer key!

So is it worth it? Buying the puzzle or trying to solve the challenges? I ultimately have to say yes. Ginny and I did have a very good time solving these puzzles. I do hope Educational Insights creates a new version with cleaned up challenges and better tiles, but all-in-all a decent puzzle to solve. Before you start solving though, make sure that you note which challenges have issues so you know to skip those. Or keep a copy of the answer key nearby so you can check! It is highly frustrating to try to solve something that simply doesn't work!

I hope this answer key helps! Remember to send me your solutions if you solve any of my missing challenges!