Kagen Sound’s Butterfly Box

Part, the third, in the Lotus-Trilogy announced several years ago by Kagen Sound arrived in Barnt Green recently. This time the wonderfully sturdy round shipping box came with not just the usual plastic cushioning wrapped around the box nestling inside – it was additionally cushioned by six comically large wood shavings, as though Kagen had been fine-tuning his kanna while he was packing up these beauties.

I’ve described my encounters with the first two puzzle boxes in the series over here and here – in short, I found them absolutely delightful – they had a lovely rhythm of trying to work out what pattern you should be striving for, trying to get the pattern to work, completely, opening a drawer and then repeating the process until you’d opened all four drawers around the hexagonal boxes. Each one started with a visual clue to the first pattern and as you progressed, each drawer would somehow provide the clue to the next pattern… both of them presented a lovely little journey and a nice sense of achievement.

The third one in the series – the Butterfly Box - builds on that progression in about the same way as the Burj Khalifa builds on the mud hut. Ostensibly it looks just like the other two (OK, I realise my Burj comparison just fell flat!) with some subtle changes to the wood varieties on the main parts, but the main features maintain the strong family resemblance: the pair of drawers feel the same, the rings on the top of the box seem to handle themselves like the previous two and generate similar sorts of patterns – you might even be tempted to think that once you’ve done the previous two, this one won’t pose a huge challenge.

That would be a large mistake.

This one is the proverbial wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing – don’t be fooled – this is not a simple little exercise in making pretty patterns, even though they are VERY pretty patterns! This is a proper puzzler’s puzzle!

From the get-go in this one you realise that things are going to be different: on the previous two you always had somewhere to start… this one gives you literally nae clue! You’ll need to cast your mind back to Kagen’s original premise of a series of puzzles where the first two helped you solve the third one…

Knowing this, I duly set about re-solving the previous two in the series in order to jog my memory a little, and to try and find the way in to this final box – and that was a good idea, not just to remind myself of the mechanics and the approach to completing the patterns (often you’ll find that the "right" pattern isn’t possible given some of the rings won’t be able to get into the position that you really need them to be in) but there is also a beautifully disguised clue waiting there for you in plain sight, sort of… and that is the start that you need for the Butterfly Box. (It is beautifully hidden and I have to admit that in the past two years I hadn’t “seen” it until now.)

Diving into the Butterfly Box it won’t take you long to clock that this one is tougher – sometimes not all of the rings really want to play ball – and that can be problematic. Finding the clues for the successive drawers is a lot harder than on the previous two boxes – so several times I found myself retracing my steps literally back to the start again in the hopes of finding something different along the way. Sometimes I found myself totally stumped with no idea of where I should be heading next or no idea what the next pattern should be – word to the wise: there are stacks of very beautiful, wonderfully symmetric patterns that won’t open a drawer for you! Creating random pretty patterns may be a wonderful way to wile away the time, but it isn't a good puzzle-solving strategy!

Find all four magic patterns and you’re ultimately rewarded with a little piece of paper with a URL on it that will transport you to a video of some of the making-of this stunning little trilogy. That video really blew my mind – seeing the amount of work that has gone into creating the sliding rings is truly gob-smacking, and some of the little details in the mechanics are wonderfully clever. (I love the use of wooden “springs”!)

And after all that, you find out that Kagen’s hidden something else in this box that you almost certainly haven’t found, so you need to go back through it and find it, don’t you? Only it’s so well-hidden that it took me several goes through the entire solution before I could finally say that I ‘d completed all of the challenges this box provides.

At the end of the day, the Butterfly Box is both a stunning work of art from a craftsman who really knows his stuff; and a memorable puzzler’s puzzle – there are 98 of them out in the wild – track one down and solve it, properly – it will make you feel good about yourself!

Rune Cube

Kagen Sound’s first foray into this field came with his Waterfall Boxes – a stunning set of boxes where the first four boxes combine to provide the map for the fifth and final box. Somewhere in the middle of that run of boxes, the Rune Box appeared: a cube with mysterious runes on each face that showed puzzlers a series of interacting mazes keeping the box from opening. That in turn developed into his entirely collapsible Maze Burr - which earned him Puzzle of the year in 2006, scooping both the Jury Grand Prize and the People’s Choice Award. He subsequently made a run of absolutely gorgeous Cocobolo Maze Burrs.

The Rune Cube takes all of that puzzling goodness and distils it down to the bare necessities. [Cue Disney earwig – you’re welcome!] A simple poplar box in the core supports sliding plates so that each maple faceplate can slide through its three-by-three maze about a stainless-steel hex screw. The mazes dictate where a panel can move, and the positions of its neighbours dictate which positions in the maze are reachable. One of the panels has a hole at the end of the maze large enough to allow the plate to be lifted clear of the box and the internal box to be opened… which is handy, because that’s where the hex key and a couple of spare screws are stored. Oh, and the inside of the lid is appropriately branded, dated and numbered. 

For each starting position, the special plate with the exit hole can always be moved, a little, which frees up one of its neighbours and so on…

Kagen’s designed the faceplates to be reversible, which adds nicely to the number of challenges available to the puzzlist. John Rausch has provided a handy accompanying PDF file which covers the history of the concept and a whole bunch of different challenges from the relatively straight-forward 6-move set-up through to the somewhat more challenging 115-move suggestion. 

The Rune Cube is about 7cm cubed – big enough to handle easily and small enough to feel like you could play all day. The simpler challenges don’t require much forward planning and you can virtually just follow the available moves through to the solution. 

Some of the longer solutions will however require quite a lot of forward planning and thinking. Nothing is ever particularly complicated, as you’d expect with the 3*3 mazes, but there’s enough planning required to tickle the little grey cells into action for a while. 

I’ve had my copy for a few weeks and I’ve enjoyed running through quite a few of the challenges provided, both on the little sheet accompanying the cube and on John’s downloadable PDF sheet. 

A huge amount of replayable puzzling fun packed into a wonderfully crafted compact little cube. 

<...and they’re currently still available for sale over here…>

<...and I've improved the spelling of my friend's name so that he's no longer merely smoke and now happily drunk again!>

Koa Bow Tie Box

A couple of months ago I was given a rather stunning Kagen Sound Koa Bow Tie Box – actually, that’s not quite true – Kagen sort of threw it at my feet in front of my friends  - or maybe dropped it might be more accurate, either way, he picked it up and gave it to me, and I was very chuffed!

[Fret not dear reader, it was well swaddled in bubble wrap at the time, and there wasn’t an ounce of maleficence in the actions!]

Developed in parallel with his larger runs of Circle Maze Boxes, this was a short run made as gifts so they look a little different, and possibly behave a little differently – but the latter is hard to confirm as they haven’t been released into the wild yet. 

The obvious feature is a large metal disk in the centre of the box with an interesting maze cut into it… through the maze you can see a wooden peg that’s attached to the lid of the box and it seems that you’re going to need to manoeuvre through the maze…

A little fiddling shows that the maze can move backwards and forwards along the lid (where that little peg allows) and it can also spin around… cool, so clearly all we’re going to need to do is to manoeuvre the maze around the peg until the lid of the box comes off.

Turns out that it’s not quite that simple, though. Quite quickly you might in fact find yourself running out of options in the maze – with no apparent way out… get past that one and you find yourself somewhere else in the maze – again, with no apparent way around things.

It’s not a horribly complex puzzle, but it’s an absolute delight to play with, and solve… and when you have, it’s hard not to admire the little details in there, from the book-matched grain all the way around the sides of the box, to the ebonised walnut peg and rails that keep the metal maze from scuffing the beautifully finished curly maple lid.

It’s a beautiful object and I consider myself hugely lucky to have one of a tiny number of them out there…