In December 2017 the French puzzle designer Grégoire Pfennig finished a fully functional 33x33x33 Rubik's Cube. With 6153 moving parts it became the world's highest order NxNxN cube and earned an official Guinness World Record for the largest order Rubik's / magic cube.
Update: this record has been broken!
We published an article in 2016 about the World's largest order NxNxN Rubik's Cube-like twisty puzzle, the 22x22x22 cube created by corenpuzzle which exploded many times. This record was broken when the 33x33x33 cube came to life and was announced on Dec 2, 2017.
The official Guinness record had been held by Oskar van Deventer's 17x17x17 "Over the Top" since 2011, a cube with 1539 parts. Greg's puzzle has four times as many pieces and almost twice as many layers.
Who Made It?
The creator of the huge puzzle is Grégoire Pfennig, a French mechanical engineer whose YouTube channel is called Greg's Puzzles where he presents his custom twisty puzzle creations. He has some simple puzzles but also many complex mechanisms, like the Greg Master Pentultimate, the Greg's Rosette or the Hardest Rubik's Cube to solve which has color changing stickers. He has designed more than 130 twisty puzzles, which makes him one of the most productive puzzle designers.
Grégoire Pfennig with the 33x33x33 cube
The cube was made in Belfort, France, and Greg presented it to the public at the 2018 Dutch Cube Day.
Technical Details
- Pieces: 6153 moving parts
- Stickers: 6534 (1089 per face), glued on with 20 g of superglue
- Size: 20.5 cm (7.95 in) edges
- Weight: 3.15 kg (6.59 lb)
- Layers: each layer is just 4.1 millimeters thick
- Material: nylon, 3D-printed with SLS technology by 3DPrintFabriek and dyed black
- Work: about 205 hours
- Record: Guinness World Record, largest order Rubik's / magic cube (2 Dec 2017)
- Price: €15,200, with a 3-month waiting time for printing and assembly
Interesting 33x33x33 Cube Facts
- You would need 1331 (!!!) 3x3x3 cubes to build a 33x33x33 structure.
- One face has 1089 stickers, more than the stickers of 20 classic Rubik's Cubes put together.
- For the same price you could buy roughly 20 mass-produced 17x17x17 cubes for your puzzle collection.
Watch the video of its creator making a checkerboard pattern to prove that it's fully functional:
How Was It Built?
A cube this big can't use the classic mechanism. On anything larger than a 6x6x6, normal sized corners would hang off the core during a turn, so big cubes like this one use enlarged corner and edge pieces to hold the tiny centers together. That's why the outer layers look wider than the inner ones.
The mechanism has 17 nested layers from the center outwards. Building it without injection moulding means every part comes from a 3D printer, and even a tiny error in one dimension gets multiplied by the number of pieces. If you'd like to build your own custom puzzles, start with our twisty puzzle modding guide.
Can You Solve It?
Yes, and the method is the same as for any big cube: you solve the centers, pair up the edges and finish it like a 3x3x3. This is called the reduction method, and you will meet the same parity cases as on a 4x4x4. The difference is the amount of work: building 31x31 centers piece by piece would take many hundreds of hours.
If you don't have €15,000 to spend, you can practice on a virtual big cube. Try our 11x11x11 simulator or the NxNxN cube simulator and solver, which handles much bigger cubes than the ones used in competitions.
The Cubes That Beat It
Records are made to be broken, and the 33x33x33 held on to the title for more than six years.
In May 2024 Matt Bahner's 34x34x34 took the record with one extra layer. It weighs 43 kg.
Soon after, Yang Yongshun showed a 35x35x35, and in autumn 2024 a mechanical engineering student surprised everyone with a cube that left all the others far behind.
The current record: Preston Alden's 49x49x49 cube with 13 827 pieces
Here is how the largest cube grew over the years:
- 2011: 17x17x17 by Oskar van Deventer
- 2016: 22x22x22 by corenpuzzle
- 2017: 33x33x33 by Grégoire Pfennig
- 2024: 34x34x34 by Matt Bahner
- 2024: 49x49x49 by Preston Alden