There's a note at the end that you can get more solutions by forcing a little give in the track. It's also worth noting, if you're actually buying these for your kid to play with that there's aftermarket 3rd party flexbile connectors available on Amazon, which reduces the frustration of building a really "cool" track and finding that it's not actually possible to make that final connection.
My wife and I bought a set of tracks for the kids. Then we bought a couple more sets for ourselves. We have a friendly competition to see who can build the most elaborate/aesthetics configurations. Occasionally, the kids get to play with them too.
This reminds me of the C64 game Scalextric, which had an integrated level editor with blocks inspired by its real-life counterpart. There were turns covering different angles, which (at the time) made it very hard for me to create a custom level. :)
This is very neat. When playing with this set, I've wondered about this.
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It seems the text says for 12 pieces there are 2 solutions, but the animation shows four.
Also, there doesn't seem to be a check to see whether the bridge pieces are together. (When all 's' pieces are used there has to be at least one connected pair).
Thanks. I updated the code and the post to reflect tests for the bridge case as you mention. It affected the 12 piece and 16 piece solutions. The animated gifs are udpated and should be correct now.
There's a note at the end that you can get more solutions by forcing a little give in the track. It's also worth noting, if you're actually buying these for your kid to play with that there's aftermarket 3rd party flexbile connectors available on Amazon, which reduces the frustration of building a really "cool" track and finding that it's not actually possible to make that final connection.