# The notable boards

> The famous Eternity II boards, treated as first-class citizens: Verhaard's prize-winning 467, the Blackwood record line to 470, the strict five-clue record to 464, and this project's own boards: who found each one, when, and what makes it structurally interesting. Every bundled board opens in the viewer.

- Canonical page (with interactive figures/demos): https://eternity2.dev/research/community/boards/
- Updated: 2026-07-02
- Source: msg 6337: the January 2009 scrutiny result, $10,000 to Anna Karlsson of Lund for 467/480 — https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/6337
- Source: msg 10032: Blackwood's 468 reaches the list from Reddit — https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10032
- Source: msg 10045: McGavin announces the 469 — https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10045
- Source: msg 10074: Fernandez's single-piece-swap 469 — https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10074
- Source: msg 10117: Blackwood's 470 — https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10117
- Source: msg 11401: Bucas ties the 470 — https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11401
- Source: msg 11074: Gauthier's strict five-clue 460 (the record 2023–2026) — https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11074
- Source: Riotte's 464, the new strict five-clue record (groups.io, July 2026) — https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11919
- Source: e2.bucas.name (Jef Bucas), the community viewer these boards were first shared in — https://e2.bucas.name

---
The history of Eternity II is usually told through the people and the
solvers. This page tells it through the boards themselves: the handful of
artifacts that carry the whole record line, whoever found them. Each entry
says who announced the board and where, and what is publicly known about its
structure. Every board shown here is bundled with this site: click any
preview to load it in the [viewer](/viewer) and re-score it edge by edge. The
full timeline and method history live on the
[records page](/research/records); this is the gallery.

## The record line: 467 → 468 → 469 → 470

### Verhaard's 467 (2008): the prize board

The board that won the only money Eternity II ever paid out. Louis Verhaard's
[distributed *eii* solver](/research/lab/experiments/louis-verhaard/eii), released to
volunteers in September 2008 with the words "I am stuck"
([msg 5940](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/5940)), had found 467/480
more than 40 times by different users by the time he
documented it ([msg 6275](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/6275)). At
the 31 December 2008 scrutiny the entry, submitted under the name of Anna
Karlsson of Lund (Verhaard's household), took the $10,000 best-partial prize
([msg 6337](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/6337), with the group
recognizing the winner immediately at
[msg 6349](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/6349)).

Two later footnotes change how the board reads. Re-reading Verhaard's own
account, Jef Bucas noted the 467 was achieved under a self-imposed handicap:
Verhaard had misinterpreted the rules and restricted the kind of board he
allowed himself to submit
([msg 10582](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10582)). And by 2023 the
score had become a calibration target: "last week I found about 30 x 467. I
use this target to calibrate the code I'm running"
([msg 11001](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11001)). It stood as the
record for twelve years anyway.
> **[Interactive: CommunityBoard]** Rendered on the canonical page (link above); not shown in this markdown export.
The viewer also bundles three sibling 467s (Verhaard 467a, 467b, 467c) from
the same campaign, in its board menu.

### Blackwood's 468 (2020): the outsider board

The first advance past 467 in twelve years arrived from outside the
community: a Reddit post by Joshua Blackwood, then unknown to the mailing
list, relayed at [msg 10032](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10032). A
board with only 12 breaks, 468/480. Bucas verified it, added it to the
viewer, and passed on the startling claim that the author could "find a 468
every 4 days" ([msg 10033](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10033)).
Days later Blackwood open-sourced
[the solver that found it](/research/lab/experiments/joshua-blackwood/solver)
([msg 10037](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10037)). Every board below
this point traces back to that code.
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### McGavin's 469 (2020): the ceiling board

"Your solver is fantastic!! I ran it for a few days on about a couple of
hundred cores and hit the jackpot. New record score of 469! Only 11 breaks!"
So wrote Peter McGavin, running Blackwood's freshly published solver
([msg 10045](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10045)). Blackwood
explained the solver's break discipline in the same thread: breaks are never
allowed to touch, so this 469 is equivalently a 249-piece partial with 7
holes ([msg 10051](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10051)).

Structurally this board has a signature you can check yourself: all eleven of
its unmatched edges sit in the top five rows, leaving an eleven-row slab that
is locally flawless: the damage is swept up against the edge the search
finished at. That geometry, and why it flips on boards built in the other
direction, is analyzed in
[Where the mismatches live](/research/why/mismatch-geometry).
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### The 469 wave (October–November 2020)

Bucas posted his first two 469s in October
([msg 10052](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10052), "Here are 2
other 469"), ported Blackwood's algorithm to C, roughly doubling its speed
([msg 10065](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10065)), and the stream
kept coming: boards c through g in November, from
[msg 10067](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10067) ("Another one yay
\o/") through [msg 10078](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10078),
which shipped together with the open-sourced port, *libblackwood*. All seven
are in the viewer's board menu as Bucas 469a–g.

The odd one out is Carlos Fernandez's. He fed McGavin's 469 to a
piece-exchange program of his own and found another 469 differing by a
single piece ([msg 10074](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10074)),
proof, in Bucas's words when he added it to the viewer, that "even at 469,
there is still a little bit of flexibility left"
([msg 10075](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10075)). That flexibility
is thin: it is exactly the kind of isolated tie the rigidity analysis below
predicts, not a path upward.

### The 470s (2021 and 2024): the current ceiling

Blackwood closed his own arc with a nearly wordless message: a viewer URL, a
piece list (470/480, 10 breaks), and the single line "I haven't physically
put it together yet, but I found one!"
([msg 10117](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10117)). He later
confirmed it was found with exactly the public repo's code
([msg 10161](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10161)), the retuned
schedule he had published in advance, and then stopped: "I have not written
a line of code or run any algorithms since I found a 470"
([msg 10185](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10185)).
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The score has been tied once, not beaten. In December 2024 Bucas restarted "a
few threads of Joshua's code" and another 470 appeared
([msg 11401](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11401)); Fernandez noticed
its three unmatched border figures allowed a rearrangement and posted a 470b
([msg 11403](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11403)). The 470 class
remains a Blackwood-solver monopoly, and 470 remains the ceiling: "No one is
even close… The best result to date, is the partial solution from Joshua
Blackwood, 470/480 edges matching"
([msg 11343](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11343)).
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## What the record boards share

Three publicly documented facts hold across the 468/469/470 line.

**Same clue regime.** All of them place the mandatory starter piece at its
official spot and none of the four optional clue pieces at theirs. The
community checked this for the 470
([msg 10554](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10554)), and Blackwood
confirmed he had the clue tiles and deliberately did not use them
([msg 10185](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/10185)). Under the
original contest rules only the starter was mandatory, so these boards were
prize-eligible as submitted.

**Banded mismatches.** The few unmatched edges are not scattered; they pack
into one band of rows against the edge the search finished at.
[Where the mismatches live](/research/why/mismatch-geometry) scores the real
boards live and shows the band; it also shows this project's boards
exhibiting the same band, mirrored.

**Local rigidity.** None of these boards is an almost-solution waiting for a
polish. [The rigidity wall](/research/why/rigidity-wall) uses exact
integer-programming solves to prove that on record boards, freeing whole
regions and refilling them optimally returns the same arrangement: the best
boards sit at the bottom of their own valleys. Fernandez's single-piece-swap
469 is the exception that proves the rule: a tie next door, never a step up.

## The strict five-clue line: from Gauthier's 460 to Riotte's 464

Most published record boards keep only the mandatory starter piece. In March
2023 a thread asked the stricter question: what is the best board that
respects **all five** official clues
([msg 11037](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11037))? A ladder climbed
in days: 412, then 452 and 457 (Carlos Fernandez), then 453/455/456/458
(David Barr), stopping at **Bruno Gauthier's 460**, "made with my own
program and Eternity II Editor"
([msg 11074](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11074)); McGavin converted
it to the shared viewer format
([msg 11081](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11081)).

That 460 stood for more than three years. In late June 2026 a new thread,
"Record of Eternity2 with 5 hints?", reopened the line: **Benjamin Riotte**
posted a 461, then a wave of results climbing to **464/480 (only 16 broken
edges)**, the first advance on the strict record since 2023
([groups.io msg 11919](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11919)).
**Igor Pejic** reached the same 463–464 range independently in the same
thread, using what he described as a "modified Blackwood's DFS algorithm". All
of the boards respect the five clues at their official cells (starter #139,
hints #208, #255, #181, #249).

The strict line matters because of what the five clues imply: the community's
solution-count estimate with all five clues placed is about 0.00000004
(effectively a unique target), against roughly 14,702 expected "solutions"
with the starter alone
([msg 11193](https://groups.io/g/eternity2/message/11193)). A five-clue board
is playing the exact game the designers set. The 464 stands sixteen edges below
the full solution, and that gap is itself a datum.
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## This project's boards

This site's own experiments produced four boards worth keeping, labelled for
what they are: experiments several steps below the community line, and
documented end to end. Each links
to the experiment that found it; every score is recomputed from the board's
own edges.

### PALIMPSEST (463)

The project's best, found by reading the whole corpus of strong boards to
separate genuine shared structure from shared bad habits, then attacking the
traps. The full story is in
[the PALIMPSEST experiment](/research/lab/experiments/raphael-anjou/learning/palimpsest).
> **[Interactive: RecordBoard]** Rendered on the canonical page (link above); not shown in this markdown export.
### KEYRING (460)

Built from scratch by letting three learned signals vote on every placement,
reaching 460 in a board family no earlier search here had cracked;
see [KEYRING](/research/lab/experiments/raphael-anjou/learning/keyring). Its mismatches band in the
bottom rows, the mirror image of McGavin's 469. That scan-order fingerprint
is explained in [Where the mismatches live](/research/why/mismatch-geometry).
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### PRIOR (460)

From scratch plus destroy-and-repair, breaking construction ties by where
pieces tend to sit in strong boards (see
[PRIOR](/research/lab/experiments/raphael-anjou/learning/prior)).
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### GAUNTLET (458)

The same [beam search](/research/build/construct/beam-search) run across nine
scan orders so it lands in different regions of board space; the zigzag order
found this 458. The full run is written up in
[GAUNTLET](/research/lab/experiments/raphael-anjou/pipelines/gauntlet).
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## Related

- [Records & solvers](https://eternity2.dev/research/records) — Eternity II has never been solved, but fifteen years of community effort have pushed the best board to 470/480. Who holds what, how they did it, and why some headline "480" boards are not actually the real puzzle.
- [Where the mismatches live](https://eternity2.dev/research/why/mismatch-geometry) — A near-perfect board doesn't scatter its few errors evenly. It packs them into one band of five rows and leaves all the rest flawless. Which band is decided by the direction the search filled the board, and you can see the mirror on the real record boards.
- [The rigidity wall](https://eternity2.dev/research/why/rigidity-wall) — Every record board we have is frozen in place. You cannot nudge your way from a great board to a perfect one, and we can prove it.