You got your LEGO in my cube!

While hunting for white elephant gifts, I came across something really neat.

A company called ULUZE (what is with the myriad company name concotions from online sellers?) makes a combination 3x3 cube and LEGO knockoff I had to get for myself.

Okay, so, this thing is really neat.

First, I wouldn't mistake it for a speedcube. (I have a couple of those already, both "smart"—the first one I got, Particula's GoCube and another I picked up to compare, the GAN356 i 3. The former taught me, finally, how to solve this puzzle.)

But you know, it turns rather well. I also fairly recently got fulfillment on Pride Knights' LGBTQube. These are for display (I can't imagine trying to solve them), but also, they're real Rubik's Cubes and they turn like 💩.

The Magic Cube doesn't have any real kind of corner cutting, owing to the fact that everything is very square-edged with some tiny curves to the corners. But it also doesn't really get stuck, either. My partner scrambled it and I was able to re-solve it in just a few minutes—and that was while looking at the GoCube app again because I've forgotten how to do even a beginner solve.

The other thing is that these knockoff LEGO plates aren't bad. They all snapped on firmly but without killing my fingers, and I can sit a minifig on them with no trouble.

They also included a spare for each side, which is really nice. And there's also a knockoff Brick Separator that is quite good at taking the plates off the cube sides.

Insert joke about how this is designed for sticker-peelers (people who "solve" their Rubik's Cubes by peeling the stickers off and reapplying them elsewhere), but this is a really fun little thing. It's gonna mostly be for display—I'll stick to my speedcubes for practice—but it's good quality and was definitely worth the ~$12 I paid for it.