Houston, we had a problem here

When Brian Young recently announced that he was retiring from full-time puzzle-making, I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in the puzzling world hoping that he wouldn’t be going full-on cold-turkey and that we’d occasionally still see something interesting popping up from him…

Cue sitting around at IPP41 and Brian says “Here, what do you think of this?” passing over a familiar looking box, that upon closer inspection isn’t familiar at all! Brian’s taken the shell of a standard MI Toys puzzle box and ripped out all of the puzzle-bits… and then replaced them with a little something of his own design – a bit like Kelly Snache’s up-cycling of old tea and cigar boxes.

Brian’s result is a gorgeous looking creation with the majority of an acrylic maze on display inside the box and most of the usual decoration from the original box still there on the outside… there’s a little extra lasered text differentiating it from the original donor puzzle – if the acrylic maze in the new window wasn’t sufficient.

The blurb on the box gives you the usual warnings [no external tools, no hitting and no gaffer tape (really, we need to say that now?!)] and then goads you into opening the box while noting that gravity may be more of a hindrance than a help… great!(Makes mental note to turn on local gravity field displacement device.)

A bit of inspection shows there’s a little ball bearing in that acrylic maze, so clearly you know what you have to do… and that kept me amused for a while, until I ran out of things to do and all the things I’d tried weren’t exactly being useful… so after a little thought, and some experimentation, and reminding myself of the devious fellow behind this bit of up-cycling, I found some really interesting things… and then a whole new world opened up to me – now we’re away to the races!

…and there I stopped, making no further progress – but having done enough that I know I want a copy and I tell Brian that – and I think he allows himself a bit of a smile knowing that he’s stopped me dead in my tracks…

I secure a copy from him at the puzzle party and then have a chance to play with it back at home a couple of weeks later… I can easily retrace those initial steps and find myself back in the same spot once again – thoroughly confuzzled.

A little Think(c) and a fair amount of experimentation until a little more Think(c) makes me ask myself “What if I could…” and that brings a new avenue to explore… and while it doesn’t seem nearly as intricate, it’s doing something new, and that’s usually good thing on a solve…

It is a good thing, and I open the box and get to see all the innards that had me stumped in each of the phases – they’re all elegantly simple, and nicely devious… just the sort of thing that you’d expect from Mr Puzzle himself.

Here’s hoping that Brian’s experiments in retrofitting his own mechanisms into donor boxes continues because this one’s a cracker!

[Brian had a small run of these available for sale at IPP41 - they were all sold.]