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Every time I hear someone talking about fidget toys and sensory toys and kids these days and their neurodiversity and how in *my* day (or I catch myself self-talking that way about my own fidgets) I remember that we have in the attic five boxes full of twiddle puzzles inherited from previous generations of my family.

Anyway since I was up the attic yesterday anyway, as my reward for having made serious progress on the sitting room I pulled down the box with all the Rubik's/'twisty puzzle' variants and filled up my twiddle toys shelf (There are still four more boxes of puzzle/twiddle toys up there I didn't tackle, but that one had most of the 'twisty puzzle' style ones.)

a bunch of twisty puzzles see cut below for list

1. Skewb/Pyraminx Cube
2. Meffert's Gear Ball
3. The Barrel/The Magic Octagonal Prism
4. 2x2 (Pocket Cube)
5. Pyraminx
6. A standard cube hand-modified with electrical tape to make it easier, almost certainly done by my dad based on something in Scientific American in the '80s

7. Kilominx
8. Spectra (the linear one)
9. Circus 7
10. Alexander's Star
(Also a teleidoscope, a tesseract, and a very old sandscape.)

11. Megaminx
12. The Orb
13. Rubik's Magic Star
14. Rubik's Revolution
(also a top, two gyroscopes, a stack of yo-yos, two slinkies and three transforming lotus spheres.)

14. Impossiball
15. Rubik's Cube
16. Mini Missing Link
17. (In case) 3 mini Rubik's Cubes + 1 mini Magic Ball
18. Magic Puzzle 6
19. old offbrand Rubik's Cube (mostly hidden)
20. Whirligig
21. Magic Ball
22. Disco Puzzle/Octo
23. Missing Link
24. Small Pyraminx
25. Eitan's Twist
26. Square-1/ Cube-21

As you can probably tell, I have not *super* prioritized solving them, because once they are solved you can't twiddle them anymore. (Also figuring out how to solve them on your own is half the fun, but I do it in a solely tactile way - my fingers and spatial brain, do all the thinking, there's no verbal or visual part - that is *also* half the fun because there are very few intellectual things I process that way. But it means that unless I then immediately sit down and keep doing it until it's in muscle memory I forget.)

(In my middle school original fantasy world, one of the princesses was 'autistic', although this being the early '90s I didn't really understand much about what that meant except what was in Young Wizards and Three of a Kind, but I remember thinking that most of the stereotypical 'autistic' interests didn't make sense for someone living in 14th century Doggerland, so instead she always had a puzzle toy at hand, just like in Dad's collection. In retrospect....)

Anyway now I now longer have an excuse to keep wanting to buy new fidget toys, I have plenty of my ancestral ones readily accessible <_< (we won't talk about all the fiddly handcraft tools I inherited from the other side ok)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Also those of us who didn't have access to fidget toys in the 1980s/1990s

chewed our hair

chewed our pencils - including the erasers and the metal band around the eraser

chewed the cuffs of our jumpers...

Oh, I also did those, definitely, because one difference between then and now is you couldn't nearly as easily get away with playing with a Rubik's Cube in class. (well, I didn't chew the eraser end of the pencil, it tasted foul. But my coat cuffs by contrast were delicious.)

I also once chewed random dry twigs while on a camp in a remote bit of bush in the desert - very lucky they didn't turn out to be poisonous, we were at least an 8 hour drive from the nearest nurse/doctor.

I told a supervising adult that I had splinters in my throat

and he scoffed at me "How could you possibly have splinters in your throat????????"

and I was too embarrassed to admit to chewing random twigs, so I just endured the sore throat until it went away (lucky it didn't get infected)

As a child I also chewed:

blue-tack;

plastic biro lids;

the tiny rubber tyres from lego moon buggies;

paper;

wax candles;

my mother's favourite wooden spoon...

I chewed Many Things, although if I was in a situation where I could read books and/or twiddle something, I usually managed to hold off. Also my dad chewed his tongue; it never came as naturally to me as him but if I really needed to chew I would default to that.

I'm kind of surprised I never got throat splinters, though, because if you gave me a toothpick I would chew it until I could make paper out of it.

I didn't chew things that much--if I couldn't read under my desk I almost always found some way to fiddle with my hands--but if I had a popsicle I would eat the stick.

Oooh! I had a bunch of those! Just recently got rid of a lot of them in a big move. I hope someone else is enjoying them... Calling them ancestral fiddle toys gives my collection a new perspective.

No Rubik's Revenge though? That's the 4 x 4 one, and that's the one I kept and had to remember how to solve. Some of it is in muscle memory, and some of it I had to reason about because muscle memory failed me.

Nope, we never had a 4x4! It's on my wishlist though.

Dad was mostly interested in the ones that had actually different geometry, and I'm mostly interested in the ones I can pick up cheap at thrift stores, so most of the obvious 'just a cube, but more' variants never turned up.

(I've mostly been playing with the 2x2 lately though, it's surprisingly complicated!)

I've never played with a 2x2, but one of my coworkers fiddles with one during meetings. Now that you mention it, it's all corners, and the bottom layer of corners are a pain.

Apparently there's a 5x5 too! /o\