Thursday 21 March 2024

Unsafe Deposit

<Excuse the short hiatus - we’ve been exploring Fort Lauderdale and enjoying some Caribbean sunshine! Blogging came second…>

I’ve written about Alan Lunsford’s little sequential discovery puzzles in the past- but until recently I hadn’t been able to get hold of a copy of his Unsafe Deposit as it usually contains a small bunch of coins and come countries are a little sniffy about folks posting their currency around the world…

In a bid to get his puzzles out to a wider audience, Alan has come up with an international-postage-friendly-version, which from my attempts to reintroduce some coinage after I’d solved it, suggest that he hasn’t just replaced the coins with 3D-printed tokens, he’s also taken the opportunity to change the design up a little…

Unsafe Deposit is about the same size as the previous two little guys I wrote about - there’s a pretty clear goal staring at you through a square window in the one side, a few slots and holes spread around a few of the other sides, and a hex screw blocking one of the slots that may have some treasure hiding inside it…

At the start, there appears to be very little that you can do - I spent quite a while totally convinced there was literally nothing I could do, until I summoned up the courage to do what I thought I shouldn’t… and it turned out I actually should very much have… so I was off…

As you progress you’ll find treasure or tools, you decide… there was a lovely flow to this solve early on, until there wasn’t and I found myself with a proverbial brick wall that wouldn’t budge. (I did take some comfort from seeing one or two other puzzlers at least temporarily halted by that particular stage - it’s a delightful change of gear, as it were and forces you to think(c) just a little more…) 

Once that hurdle is overcome it’s a short sprint to the finish line and retrieving that coin/token that’s been waiting patiently for you all along. 

Once again, there’s a lot going on inside this little cube, and I really love the fact that you think you know exactly what to do, until Alan throws a monkey wrench in your path and stops you dead… definitely one to toss at fellow puzzlers with a “Here, you’ll like this one…”

2 comments:

  1. Hello Allard. Is it possible to have your blogs delivered to my inbox when posted, as happens with Boxes & Booze, for example?

    ReplyDelete
  2. ...nah, I'm too old-school for that!

    ReplyDelete