Lewis Evans’ Gordian Knot

About a year ago Lewis asked if he could borrow my copy of Stickman’s Gordian Knot so I posted it down to him… a short while later it was back home again with Lewis saying he’d really enjoyed the solve and he’d done all the measuring and 3D modelling he needed to…. Given how quickly it returned, I was pretty sure that he’d been thoroughly scared off by the project. That was my first mistake.

A couple of months later there were a few more questions and the puzzle duly did another round trip to Lewis’ workshop – Lewis doesn’t scare easily, and in September he was ready to begin taking pre-orders and I wasn’t going to miss out on this one.

My copy arrived in mid-December and it looks brilliant… while the original is covered in a lattice of different coloured woods, Lewis’version is all in a single colour with a bunch of cast metal accents strategically placed about the faces. The single colour does a great job of hiding the connections between the pieces and makes the sides look far more similar and harder to differentiate. (I’m sure that wasn’t intentional!)

Finding the way in is tricky, there’s a lot to explore and only so much of it is actually useful… as I played with it memories of solving the original definitely provided some inspiration, but my memory turned out to be somewhat foggy and it ended up taking me a long time to get through to the reveal and what would have been the final step on the original… let’s just pause here for a moment and remind ourselves of just what an awesome reveal that is… you’re playing with an intricate box when all of a sardine you’re presented with something that makes sense of some stuff you’ve found earlier and you find yourself thinking “surely not?”… when indeed…

That bit of the solve literally blows everyone’s mind and it’s a wonderful thing to see the look in puzzlers’ eyes when they twig what’s about to happen… Lewis’ copy does that just as brilliantly…

But then there’s more….

Rather than being the rather wonderful end to the journey, Lewis provides just a pause, before the journey continues…!

I spent a very long time not making any progress at this stage – I was certain I knew what I wanted to happen – I just couldn’t get it to actually do anything… I tried a bunch of different things, some of them several times hoping for a different outcome (yes, yes…) and then last Sunday, I gave it to Ali partially solved and asked him to help me… and a short while later I saw him doing something I hadn’t – because, well, why would you? Except it was definitely having an impact, and a positive one at that…

Ali had it open soon after that and we examined the innards and it was very clear why what I was trying was never going to work and what Ali was clearly doing "wrong", was in fact exactly what was required…

Lewis has added a brilliant twist to the end of the original – the first part of the solution follows the original faithfully, and the last bit is just excellent.

Kudos to Lewis for taking on this project and making an already excellent puzzle even better, and then bringing a whole bunch of new copies into the community – the world definitely needs more than the original 28 Gordian Knots…