Stickman Illogical Puzzle Box

What a great name for a puzzle box! That name really throws down the gauntlet to any puzzler feeling up to the challenge…

Stickman Illogical Puzzle Box is Robert Yarger’s 19^th Stickman puzzle box. Twenty four copies were originally made available on Cubic Dissection back in 2009 and very few of them have appeared on any of the usual puzzle auction sites since then.

While it may not look particularly menacing, this is a brute of a puzzle box! As usual for Stickman boxes, it is beautifully made in wenge, cherry and walnut. It’s surprisingly heavy for a modest sized-box – suggesting some dense materials have been secreted inside there … it resembles a squashed cube with some strange symbols on all of the visible surfaces and comes with a set of four wooden tiles with similar symbols on some of them. The tiles clearly have magnets in them (either that or they’re possessed!) and a bit of experimentation proves that there are magnets in odd places on pretty much all of the visible surfaces of the box. Placing a tile in a specific spot will either result in it sticking or being repelled – without much clue as to which of those might be the more useful.

There’s almost no give in any of the panels (one has a little bit of movement that suggests at least what you might be trying to achieve in unlocking the box – if you make a couple of mental leaps, at least) and when you start, very little indication of what those strange symbols might mean.

The puzzle’s description tells you that you are to use the magnetic keys, properly positioned over at least 13 ‘moves’ to unlock the box and hint that the key to their correct placement is given through those pesky symbols … time to play around a little …

Although there are four triangular keys, only three will fit on any given side of the box at a time – the offset squares on each face create three positions (left, centre and right) in each of two rows (upper and lower) however the upper and lower rows overlap in the middle allowing the keys to be placed either in a V-shape or an inverted V-shape, only – that narrows things down a little, at least – however each key can fit in each position in two ways (by flipping them over) – so for each of the 4 side faces there are 48 combinations (choose 3 keys from 4, place them in one of two configurations across 3 positions i.e. [4 choose 3] * 2 * 3!). That’s still quite a lot, and if, as it turns out, you need to unlock panels in succession, you could be faced with hundreds of attempts before you find your first movement – those odds aren’t good (and anyway, I think I’m allergic to brute-force approaches like that!), so it’s probably going to be (well!) worthwhile trying to work out what those symbols mean…

There seem to be a scattering of different sorts of symbols (big dots, little dots and lines) and combinations thereof on the top and on the sides of the box – similarly the keys share the same symbols, but the combinations between the keys and positions on the sides don’t quite match up … so think this through a bit – and try and work out how the top of the box fits in with all this …

While that examination / thought process is going on I spot something a bit more subtle on the sides that instantly cuts down on the number of possibilities, significantly, and wonder how I hadn’t noticed that before … [in fact, considering how the magnets might be orientated will allow you to reduce some of the possibilities a bit further, but that still leaves a shed-load to try!]

Fiddle around on a bit of paper with the symbols on the keys and the various positions around the sides – try a few experiments, all the while constantly reminding myself not to over-complicate things (I’m predisposed to doing that, and more often than not it gets me into trouble rather than helping me out!). A couple of theories ‘almost’ work and then finally one gives a unique solution for most of the sides – but the last side resists, and yet, when you test the theory on the top of the box, something special seems to happen – which all but confirms that you’re on the right track … 

OK so we’ve got a theory that works for all bar one side, so decide to leave that one until last and hope that inspiration strikes – it quickly becomes apparent that the various sides interact in a nice predictable way, and if you want to leave the difficult side until last, you can work out where to start from, and it’s really pleasing when you apply the keys to the right spots and things ‘react’ and release the side, and then the next … until you’re looking at an open panel with the usual Stickman signature staring back at you – RESULT! (… and yeah, I left out quite a lot in the middle there somewhere … gotta leave you some entertainment of your own if you stumble across one of these little guys…)

…and the neatest thing of all: close up the sides and the box instantly resets itself back to the starting position – great if you’re wanting to rest the box for the next victim  puzzler – lousy if you close a side while you’re still trying to work out how that code works … guess when I first discovered that feature!

Not a simple puzzle – but a very rewarding one … 




Puzzling Postscript: A couple of guys came around to the house to talk and play puzzles today - and they had a shot at this one. After a while I tried to nudge them in the right direction only to realise, rather embarrassingly, that I'd forgotten how to apply one particular aspect of the code - that meant the box stayed securely locked until after the guys had left - sorry guys! It does still work properly - I was just being a dork!