Maaike’s 3-bridges challenge
The idea for this challenge arrived when Maaike Kock sent us a solution for one of our Pentomino-honorary-citizenships. Unfortunately, one of the requirements was not met by her solution. Maaike’s solution has however led to our new challenge.

You have one set of pentominoes at your disposal.

Use this set to build three bridges, maximising the total enclosed area.
The bridges contain 1, 2 and 9 pentominoes.
The pentominoes touch each other with at least one side and must lie in the same plane.
Each pentomino can only be part of a single bridge.

So, in this solution, Maaike has a total of 126 enclosed squares.

This Excel file will make searching for a solution a bit easier.
To download it click with the right mouse button and choose ‘Save target as ...’ to save this Excel file on your hard disk or diskette.

An help in searching for solutions is the program “FlatPoly2”. You can download it from the homepage of Aad van de Wetering, Driebruggen.