11/06/2021
The Megaminx, or Magic Dodecahedron, was invented by several people independently and produced by several different manufacturers with slightly different designs. Uwe Mèffert eventually bought the rights to some of the patents and continues to sell them in his puzzle shop under the Megaminx moniker. It is also known by the name Hungarian Supernova, invented by Dr. Cristoph Bandelow. His version came out first, shortly followed by Meffert's Megaminx. The proportions of the two puzzles are slightly different.
The Megaminx is made in the shape of a dodecahedron and has 12 faces and centerpieces, 20 corner pieces, and 30 edge pieces. The face centers each have a single color, which identifies the color of that face in the solved state. The edge pieces have two colors, and the corner pieces have three. Each face contains a centerpiece, 5 corner pieces, and 5 edge pieces. The corner and edge pieces are shared with adjacent faces. The face centers can only rotate in place, but the other pieces can be permuted by twisting the face layer around the face center.
There are two main versions of the Megaminx: one with 6 colors, with opposite faces having the same color, and one with 12 different colors. The 12-color Megaminx is the only type legal in official WCA competitions and is therefore much more popular than the 6-color version.
The objective of the puzzle is to scramble the colors, and then restore them to its original state of having one color per face.
The world record time for a Megaminx solve is 27 seconds, set by Juan Pablo Huanqui of Peru on 28 July 2018 at CubingUSA Nationals 2018, in Salt Lake City, Utah.
