Multiball

Eric Fuller makes good boxes. 

So when he announces a new puzzle box, they don’t tend to stay in the shop for very long. Multiball wasn’t an exception and sold out pretty rapidly… I managed to sneak a copy and have enjoyed getting my tiny little head around it. It took a while, but it was worth it. 

The externals are all Ash and Wenge, with a little clear bit of acrylic offering a helpful(?) window – nice contrast, and the internals are walnut and some bits of stainless steel(!). 

It purports to be a fairly honest puzzle with the clear little window supposedly there to help you work out what’s going on inside and come up with a strategy for defeating it all… but it offers a little more “help” than it ideally should – sort of like another puzzle with a similar feature that confounded me for jolly months – I thought I could see everything I wanted to, only to realise after quite a while that some of what I knew I could see was in fact a reflection or a diffraction and things weren’t quite where I thought they were… so I was a little weary at this particular little gift horse of a window. 

You can work out where the main locking mechanism is fairly quickly, and you can see its and bobs moving around and interfering with one another, you can even work out a bit of a strategy for getting some things to happen and keeping others things from happening… sadly none of this seems to have any impact on your ability to open the box. 

Think (c). And then Think (c) some more. 

Experiment with a plan in mind. Deduce what is more successful and what is less successful, and open the box. Simples…

…and if you’re doing it right, you should be able to do it repeatedly in a few seconds each time, without any luck or dexterity required…