About

Rotos consists of frame made from two overlapping circular disks. There are 10 round moving pieces held inside, visible through holes in the puzzle frame. Each disk holds 7 of the pieces - one in the centre of the disk and 6 arranged around the rim. Each disk can be turned (by multiples of 60 degrees), so that 6 pieces are cycled around by a move. There are holes on both sides of the frame, and on one side the pieces are numbered from 0 to 9 while on the other there are three red, three green and four yellow pieces. In the solved position the top row has red pieces or the numbers 1-3, the middle row is yellow or 4-7, the bottom row is green or shows 890. This puzzle was made in East Germany in the early eighties and is quite rare. At first glance it seems related to other two-disk puzzles such as Turnstile/puzzler and Rashkey. It is in fact related more closely to Rubik's Rings and Hungarian Rings. Whereas those have rings with 34 or 38 pieces and intersections 6 or 5 pieces apart, Rotos has rings of 6 pieces with intersection points 2 pieces apart. Rotos was invented by Manfred Fritsche, and patented on 4 June 1986, DD 236,263. Manfred also invented the Figurenmatch and Stern, which are discussed on the Pyramorfix page. If your browser supports it, you can click on the link below to play with a Javascript version of Rotos.