Late to the party…

For one reason or another, I wasn’t a huge fan of Felix Ure’s Titan puzzle – probably to do with my spidey senses not being finely tuned enough – and I allowed that to get in the way of my picking up a copy of Hip Flask when it first came out… but then I heard some good things about it and I decided I should really have a copy in the hoard, so I ordered a copy from Crux Puzzles… which duly arrived a couple of days later.

The puzzle does a pretty good impression of an actual hip flask and the lid moves around a bit and even comes out a bit every now and then. You’re told that the aim is the remove the lid completely… which sounds like an eminently sensible thing to do to a hip flask.

There’s a hole in the bottom of the flask, and a few big fat pins that occasionally tease you on the top, and something hiding in the side evidenced by the end of a screw lurking just below the surface. And that’s it. 

There’s nothing else to see…

So time to get a-fiddlin’ – after a bit of said fiddling’ you’ll find that the lid will begin to emerge, and then you’ll find yourself exactly back where you started again… and there’s a definite dense of déjà vu from around the thirtieth time you repeat that cycle!

However, if you stop and Think (c) and plan your way forward, you will surely be rewarded.

At one point on that journey you may well find yourself rewarded with a tool, although it does seem rather useless… so you may as well push forward… it’s when you get rewarded with your second tool that things get really interesting... and at this point you’re probably beginning to smell potential victory – only this puzzle has the last laugh and definitively slams the door in your face, so to speak.

I really love the final element on this puzzle – it’s definitely one of those puzzles that works well against some puzzler’s mindsets – like mine!