Matchstick Puzzles

When the teddy bears were on holiday earlier this year, the weather was sometimes too bad to go out. One day there was snow, gales and torrential rain - all in the same day!! So they decided that day was probably safest to stay inside and find something else to do.

Their pals, Oscar and WalkerBear were with them, and Oscar asked them if they would like to try working out some puzzles he had with him. The bears thought that would be great fun, so Oscar pulled out a box of matchsticks - these weren't real matches, which teddy bears are obviously not allowed to play with - but small wooden sticks about the length of normal matchsticks.

He arranged some of the matchsticks into a shape containing lots of squares. Then he asked the bears if they could change the number of squares just by removing a specific number of matchsticks. His first puzzle showed 5 squares and they had to try to change that into 3 just by removing 3 matchsticks.

It seemed very difficult at first. They tried removing several matchsticks, but kept ending up with either the wrong number of squares, or removing too many (or too few) matchsticks.

Eventually, Scary managed to work it out. Hurrah! And the bears started to understand how to approach the puzzle solving.

Oscar wouldn't look at any of the answers until they had all tried their best to work them out, so that meant that he could join in too.

There are pictures here of the layouts of the matchsticks for the 6 puzzles the bears did, numbered 1 to 6. Here are the instructions for each:

Puzzle 1: Leave just 3 squares by removing 3 matchsticks

Puzzle 2: Leave just 3 squares by removing 5 matchsticks

Puzzle 3: Leave just 2 squares by removing 8 matchsticks

Puzzle 4: Leave just 2 squares by removing 2 matchsticks

Puzzle 5: Leave just 6 squares by removing 8 matchsticks

Puzzle 6: Leave just 3 squares by removing 6 matchsticks

You can find out the answers by clicking here. Promise not to look until you have tried puzzling them out yourselves! Have fun!