Minima Texas

I managed to pick up a bunch of new puzzles from Tye in Houston and one of them has had me scratching my head for an inordinate amount of time: Frederic Boucher’s Minima Texas, produced by Steve Smith.  

The familiar 2*2*3 box with the odd window here and there seems to have a number of wooden blocks already inside it… which is unusual because the Minimas’ challenge is normally putting the blocks into the box… oh, and there’s a dirty great bolt sticking out of one of the sides…

The instructions ask you to retrieve the oil barrel, find your number and then reset the puzzle… hang on – there’s an oil barrel in there?!

I end up spending literally weeks doing the obvious thing, which then permits some things to move around, and you feel like this could be the start of something promising… only to come up against a very hard stop, every single time… there’s just nothing left to do, and it doesn’t feel like anything particularly major has happened yet – there certainly isn’t a serial number or a barrel of oil anywhere in sight!

Must try harder…

I repeat this process over the course of several weeks because, hey, you know, something different might happen… I check in with some of my mates who’re also working on it and find they’re having the same experience that I am… but that doesn’t really help…

At some point I’m giving myself a bit of a talking to about how bad puzzlers don’t test their assumptions (most often because they haven’t even realised they’ve made a particular assumption) and I set about testing all of my assumptions thus far…and wouldn’t you know it, I find something I “knew”, that I really didn’t…. for the first time in weeks I feel like I’m getting something out of this puzzle…

My new discovery opens up some new things to explore and I find a way to make it really useful and I start learning things about this puzzle that I’d been blissfully unaware of up until now… this little guy holds quite a few secrets!

By the time I finally manage to find my serial number and my oil barrel I feel like I know this petite little puzzle intimately, and while I might start out thinking that the rest is going to be tricky, it turns out that if you’ve put in as many hours as I have on the solve, resetting it is a piece of cake.

Definitely the most complex of the Minimas I’ve tackled so far… it’s an absolute delight!