Stickman #1

The Oak Wood Slide Box definitely wasn’t the first Puzzlebox that Robert Yarger produced, but it was the first design that was given a number and signified intent to keep them coming… so from that perspective it’s an important puzzle in the canon.

On the outside it looks reasonably modest – a simple little chest of drawers without any fussy decoration – or indeed any way to open the drawers that are all rather securely locked in place. The ends of the drawers seem to have finger holes in them, but they don’t seem overly useful, yet.

Examine the box closely and you’ll find a few interesting features, that will in turn lead to another that’s hidden away inside – find what it does and you might find a drawer unexpectedly popping open… and you’ll see that Rob’s gone to town on making the insides pretty – lining the drawers with green crushed velvet – nice touch.

From there you need to experiment a little to find how to get into drawer number two, but given you’ve got this far, it probably won’t take you very long to find your way into number two.

…at this point you might be reasonably satisfied with your progress, but you’ll probably notice that you haven’t used about half of the available space in there so you might just be suspecting that there’s more to be found, and you wouldn’t be wrong… getting into it is a little trickier though.

I spent quite a while trying to imagine how the heck Rob has achieved what he has using the bits that interact to get them to behave the way they do… and then gave up. Clearly he has used some of Terry Pratchett’s practical magic inside there to get things to perform different functions.

For me, this is the start of the series (yes I know there were others before that, heck I even have some of them in my collection!) and that makes it a little bit special… it also just happens to be a really nice puzzle too! 

Everyone’s a winner!