Gear Box

A couple of months ago I’d asked Wil to send me a couple of things off his latest update and at the end of my note, I’d asked him if there was “anything else that I just had to buy at the moment…” He duly replied to tell me that he did indeed have something that I ought to buy and by coincidence it didn’t have a name yet, so he’d decided that it would be called the “Anything Else Box” – and as Wil has never once given me a bad suggestion, I added it to the order and eagerly awaited its arrival.

A few days later I found a handsome box with twelve intriguing gears on the lid – there are three rows, with each row having four meshed gears – and a set of connectors ensures that the navigating pins are ganged together between the rows – so the pins in a specific column all need to move up and down in unison… which is great because it dramatically cuts down on the possible moves at any one point in the process… and it also means that you need to go through quite a few moves to find a solution…

It seems pretty clear that this is a box, and that by manipulating those gears and their connectors, you should be able to unlock the lid… in its fully locked state, the connectors are in a position that allows the acrylic lid to slot neatly into place – ensuring that if you want it neat and tidy, you’re probably at the furthest possible state from being able to actually open the thing… nice touch!

Remove the lid (– that’s not supposed to be part of the puzzle, Nick!) and begin to fiddle with those gears – given the paths through the gears, it looks like you’ll be wanting to get all of the gears pretty much to the opposite ends of their travel… and that you’ll need to both rotate them and manipulate those connectors… however, being meshed gears within the rows, they will obviously move in opposite directions to their neighbour – which means you really need to keep a cool head when you’re trying to work out which way you’re wanting things to go at any point… and you will need to think about that quite a lot in my experience.

I’m pretty sure those paths and the order of the gears are constructed to confuse – I found myself going backwards and forwards several times as I thought I was heading in the right direction only to find that I should have done something else before this particular set of moves to release a later move, so I’d need to backtrack and try again…

…and there was a whole lot of backtracking because I kept finding myself up against a position that couldn’t be improved from where I was…

…and in spite of all that backtracking, I still didn’t find myself getting into that normal Zen-space of mindlessly navigating an n-ary puzzle – this one kept me on my toes all the way through and it almost felt like you were having to work things from first principles the whole time…

When you do finally get to where you think you want to be, there’s a sneaky little step at the end that might leave you confused for a while once again until you finally release the locking mechanism and open the box – and at that point you really do need to admire Jean-Claude’s impressively efficient design that puts all of the mechanism inside a really slim lid… which leaves LOTS of space for putting something surprising inside the box for the next puzzlist to discover.

A damn fine recommendation from Wil that’s now more widely available as the Gear Box – it’s always going to be the Anything Else Box for me though…