Bookcase Logic Puzzle

Today, I’m sharing a Bookcase logic puzzle. I typed up this puzzle over a year ago and never got around to using/sharing last year because I could never remember to bring a piece of red cardstock to school with me to print out the pieces.

This bookcase based logic puzzle is from The Big, Big, Big Book of Brainteasers.

You can still access quite a few of the puzzles in The Big, Big, Big Book of Brainteasers for free, though. Amazon’s Look Inside Feature lets you look at quite a few of the puzzles for free. Just keep clicking “Surprise Me!” on the left pane to see a different page of puzzles. 

I printed a bookcase puzzle template on 11 x 17 cardstock.

The top is printed with six clues that instruct how the nine items printed on colored paper should be placed.

The clues reference three types of items: flowers, toys, and books. And, it mentions that there are red, blue, and yellow copies of each item.

I created a page of pieces to represent each item, and I printed it three separate times on three different colors of paper (red, blue, and yellow).

This makes three separate sets of pieces for solving this puzzle. I would rather end up with extra pieces than waste paper.

If you don’t have access to red, yellow, and blue paper, you could easily edit the bookcase puzzle file to match the colors that you do have access to. 

I combined the fact that all items on the top shelf are red with the fact that the leftmost item on each shelf is a flower to determine that a red flower should be the leftmost item on the top shelf.

Then, I used the clue that the middle shelf holds two yellow items which are not books to place the yellow flower and yellow toy on the middle shelf.

And, I’ll leave the rest of the bookcase puzzle to you and your students to solve!