Stickman Domino Puzzlebox

Stickman no.16 

This thing is beautiful – incredibly beautiful!

I’ve tried to take some pictures that do it justice and I’ve failed. The detailing on the box itself it brilliant – the Stickman on the one side and Devost logo on the other are executed superbly. The box itself is made of walnut and Monticello and the tiles are made of exotic burl.

As a puzzle, it’s not conceptually that tough: it’s really a sliding tile puzzle, with three layers of tiles, most of which are made up of a set of domino tiles (yes, there’s a full set in there so you can actually play dominoes once you open the box!) and the rest are a number of different shapes to keep things interesting. 

  

Tilting the box generally slides things around until they hit something else and there are quite a few holes that you can poke your fingers through to encourage tiles to move or stop them from moving... it’s fairly clear what the goal is and where you need to move the space to in order to open the box, but some of the odd shapes can seriously hamper that – especially when some of them are hiding in the middle layer or partly obscured by the logos.  

 

It’s a pretty free format puzzle, so reassembly is really up to the puzzler – you can make it as hard or as easy as you like for the next puzzler...

  

This box is number 2 of 25, and was one of only three that used exotic burl for the dominoes – the detailing in the grain really is beautiful...