After seeing me solve a Rubik's Cube in less than a minute, my 10-year old son really wants to get into speedcubing. It just so happens that TheCubicle.us sent me an email full of discounted cubes the other day. I headed over to The Cubicle to see what was on sale.

He's just getting started, so he doesn't need a fancy $25 dollar cube. Just a cheap thing will do. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that they had 2x2s and 3x3s on sale for less than $3 bucks. They also had a 4x4 on sale for $5.79. I wasn't going to buy a 4x4, not any time soon anyway. I told myself that I'd rather get faster at the 3x3 before taking on a harder cube, but I just couldn't help myself. I even picked up a 2x2 just for the hell of it. Go big or go home, right?





The 2x2 is kind of easy, so I'm not going to get into it right now. I want to jump right in with the 4x4.

I'm sure it's not the best cube, but what do you want for $5 bucks? I'm sure it's fine just for learning the algorithms.



It came with a cheat sheet, but it might as well be in Chinese. Wait, it is in Chinese.



Nice colors. The cube feels pretty solid. It doesn't feel nearly as junky as I expected it to be. It might just be an OK cube.





I hopped online and watched a video or two. It's relatively straight forward, if you know how to solve a 3x3.

This is by no means a tutorial, I just want to show that I did it!

The first thing you have to do is make the centers on all sides.



You pair up the edges, then F2L. All very similar to the 3x3.



Solving the yellow side is a little trickier, but fixing the corners and moving the edges around is also very similar to the 3x3.



Not bad. It's not impossible. I thought I was going to be at it for days, but I solved it in probably under an hour, and that was while watching the video. There was some pausing and rewinding, etc. So I feel pretty confident that with some practice, I can memorize the algorithms and get pretty good at it.