Every day, rearrange the pieces to leave the current date visible and cover everything else. Inspired by A-Puzzle-A-Day – DragonFjord
I’m not sure how to finish it, so I haven’t glued the pieces together yet. I was trying to think of a way to get to get some paint or something in the carved numbers and text just to give them a little more pop. I’m open to suggestions.
Speaking out of my butt here: Maybe some kind of clear coat to prevent bleeding into the wood fibers, then fill with color, then sand the top layer back to clean up boo-boos?
Looks great! Not that this helps you now, but I see many people sticking vinyl to the wood before cutting it. Then they can paint the text before pulling off the vinyl.
In this situation, you could consider spray painting this just sanding until the top surface is back down to wood.
I love that puzzle. I have a copy from dragon fjord and it is well made. I have done a little project on it too. I was curious and I made a script to solve it.
Spoiler:
There are multiple solutions for each day.
I also designed some stls to print the puzzle too. But I never tried it and I never published it (out of respect for the original maker). I might try to laser it though. That seems like a good project.
Personally, I like the idea of just the laser cut engraving. I would try spraying it with shellac.
I’m curious how you approached the algorithm?
Brute force 
.
Most of the work was making the puzzle piece representation, and how they were placed, detecting collisions. Once I had a way to rotate, flip and insert pieces, I just started in the top left and tried to place pieces until a combination didn’t work. Then I would try the next one. If I couldn’t get pieces 1,2,3,4 in that order, then I didn’t try any combinations that started with 1,2,3,4 (early exit criteria).
This was all in python, and I printed the solutions to the terminal. But generally, it was quick (a few minutes could come up with all solutions for every day).
If I made a website for people to cheat and get a solution, I would probably just cache the results from the python script and include that in the website data. Then the web site would need to just have a place to pick a date, and present a solution.
You could epoxy fill the numbers and outlines then plane it off and sand or just sand and then poly or shellac it.
