Articulate the Alien

Challenge Description:

This challenge is called Articulate the Alien! All players enter a room blindfolded. Players are tasked to solve a 3D puzzle. One side of the room has 4 completed puzzles, and the other has 4 puzzle bases and 4 sets of pieces. Players must move across the room to feel the solved puzzle and attempt to recreate it at their station. The trick here is that some puzzle pieces might fit, but are not correct (pink pieces), so you must pay close attention to the solution puzzle. The first player to accurately recreate their puzzle, wins immunity!

Challenge Document

Inspiration:

This challenge was performed on the CBS Survivor show. Members of the Survivor Northeastern Production team wanted to run this challenge, so I decided to source the materials myself and build the challenge from scratch. I changed the design to be an alien face to align with the space theme of the season! Click the button below to see a clip of this challenge being ran on CBS Survivor.

Inspiration Video

Skills Learned:

3D Printing, Product Design, DFA

Base Model

The first item I designed for this challenge was the base of the puzzle: an alien face. I drew a few sketches and decided I wanted the alien to have an oval head with insertion points for antennas, eyes, a mouth, a nose, and a neck. Using this information, I created a SolidWorks model which is shown below. For the insertion points, I extruded cut .25" .5" deep cylindrical holes to fit pegs attached to puzzle pieces. For larger features, such as the eyes, I chose to have 4 insertion points to ensure that the puzzle pieces could only be inserted in one correct position. In addition, I added eyebrows to the base of the puzzle to give players a reference when completing the challenge.

Puzzle Pieces Design

Using SolidWorks, I designed all of the puzzle pieces. I added slight chamfers to each peg to ensure that the pieces inserted seamlessly. In addition, I decreased the diameters of the pegs by a good margin to ensure they would both fit and align with the holes in the face base.

Reference Final Design

To create the reference puzzle, I 3D printed the face base and all of the pieces in black PLA. After testing that all puzzle pieces fit smoothly in the face base, I super glued the puzzle together so that pieces did not fall out during the challenge and confuse the players. See the reference puzzle in the image below.

Puzzle Final Design

The image below shows the final design of the puzzle. The face base was painted green to emphasize the fact that it is an alien for filming purposes. All of the correct puzzle pieces were 3D printed using black PLA, and the incorrect puzzle pieces were printed using pink PLA. This is to increase entertainment when watching the challenge pan out, for you viewers can see in real time when players are placing incorrect pieces. After testing, we found that having slightly incorrect pieces for every element except the eyes created the perfect level of difficulty.

Video

The video below shows an excerpt of the challenge!

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