The Louvre

Brian Young’s latest sequential discovery puzzle rocks!

This write-up is a long time overdue… and in spite of that, Brian still has these beauties for sale on his website over here. There’s no reason not to indulge…

My copy arrived, personally delivered and gift-wrapped, when Brian and Sue visited us ahead of IPP37 in Paris… Gill had arranged to buy a copy for me as a birthday present from my sister, and no matter how hard I tried to convince Sue to let me have it, she refused and insisted on handing it over to Gill – in fairness she knew that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from unwrapping it and playing with it a month ahead of my birthday… but once it was safely in Gill’s hands, I had no option but to wait…

I got spoilt absolutely rotten for my birthday, and The Louvre was one of those things I kept revisiting, trying to make a little more progress on… and it ended up taking me quite a long time to get all the way through the path of discovery.

Brian’s introduction to the puzzle challenges you to find a French flag, a flagpole and the Mona Lisa and then raise the flag at full mast… sounds simple? Don’t you believe it!

At the start of the solve, there’s not a lot that can be done… there are a few holes and a couple of shiny nail heads on the front of the detailed building. There seems to be a panel on the bottom, although it doesn’t seem particularly keen to do anything useful… Oh, and Brian tells you there aren’t any magnetic locks so there’s probably no reason for bashing this cute little building. 

It turns out there are three main locking mechanisms to defeat – getting past the first one took me absolute ages – it’s a wonderfully simple little mechanism that is thoroughly devilish to work out… or that’s my excuse anyway! 

From there, things get tricky, although having seen some of Brian’s other puzzles might help a bit… 

There are tools and “stuff” to discover along the way… until you finally have the whole puzzle opened up and all the little bits in front of you… and you’re still not done! 

Time to raise the flag and display the Mona Lisa… the latter might be simple, but the former aint! 

This puzzle rewards a thorough understanding of each step in your progression – or you’ll easily find yourself going backwards a little and then realising your theories on how you’d progressed all turned out to be wrong… yup! Got the t-shirt! 

Get the flag raised on the flagpole at full mast and you can rightly be proud of your achievements… 

Return it back to the starting position and you’ll know that you really understand things in there…

Brian’s really gone and crammed a whole lot of puzzling into this little gem – and IMHO it’s definitely worth the price of admission…

Thanks Oz, I love it!

Postscript: for the love of all that is sacred – do NOT be tempted to insert a finger inside to play with “the mechanism” – you will regret it for a very long time … Yes, I have one of those t-shirts as well!