Packman

A cool cultural reference and the puzzle’s goal encapsulated in a simple name – Pac(k)Man is another neat little aluminium puzzle from Gary Foshee’s workshop. It comes in one of his customary purple velvet drawstring bags and it’s most definitely pocket-sized.

In its unsolved state it has a large screw-head protruding outside of the little aluminium cube and you’re told that your goal is to get everything either inside the cube or at least flush with the sides. The projecting screw-head is nicely knurled, making it pretty easy to unscrew it with just your digits. There’s an obvious place to put this screw, except that it’s pretty clear that there’s something blocking the hole so the screw can’t get all the way home, leaving it projecting a bit.

Well it was never going to be that simple, was it?!

OK, so what else have we got? Well there’s another screw in there, but it’s flush with the surface and unless you have Chris’ weird fingers, you’re going to need a tool to get that one out… it needs a hex wrench… but you don’t seem to have one… examining things a bit more and you’ll see that there’s an exit hole for what appears to be the goodie partially blocking the screw hole you want to use for the big screw…except it’s being held in place by that flush little hex-headed screw… so where is that hex tool?

Depending on how you approach these things it might only take you a couple of seconds, or it may take quite a while, but when you find it you’ll grin a bit… that lets you make a little more progress but pretty soon you’ll find yourself stumped again – and I really loved this second little brick wall that you hit – you think it’s all plain sailing from there only to find another road-block that requires an altogether different approach to problem-solving!

Great little puzzle!

[In answer to the inevitable question: privately – they haven’t been generally available for many years!]