Minima Texas

I managed to pick up a bunch of new puzzles from Tye in Houston and one of them has had me scratching my head for an inordinate amount of time: Frederic Boucher’s Minima Texas, produced by Steve Smith.  

The familiar 2*2*3 box with the odd window here and there seems to have a number of wooden blocks already inside it… which is unusual because the Minimas’ challenge is normally putting the blocks into the box… oh, and there’s a dirty great bolt sticking out of one of the sides…

The instructions ask you to retrieve the oil barrel, find your number and then reset the puzzle… hang on – there’s an oil barrel in there?!

I end up spending literally weeks doing the obvious thing, which then permits some things to move around, and you feel like this could be the start of something promising… only to come up against a very hard stop, every single time… there’s just nothing left to do, and it doesn’t feel like anything particularly major has happened yet – there certainly isn’t a serial number or a barrel of oil anywhere in sight!

Must try harder…

I repeat this process over the course of several weeks because, hey, you know, something different might happen… I check in with some of my mates who’re also working on it and find they’re having the same experience that I am… but that doesn’t really help…

At some point I’m giving myself a bit of a talking to about how bad puzzlers don’t test their assumptions (most often because they haven’t even realised they’ve made a particular assumption) and I set about testing all of my assumptions thus far…and wouldn’t you know it, I find something I “knew”, that I really didn’t…. for the first time in weeks I feel like I’m getting something out of this puzzle…

My new discovery opens up some new things to explore and I find a way to make it really useful and I start learning things about this puzzle that I’d been blissfully unaware of up until now… this little guy holds quite a few secrets!

By the time I finally manage to find my serial number and my oil barrel I feel like I know this petite little puzzle intimately, and while I might start out thinking that the rest is going to be tricky, it turns out that if you’ve put in as many hours as I have on the solve, resetting it is a piece of cake.

Definitely the most complex of the Minimas I’ve tackled so far… it’s an absolute delight!

 

Pinball Wizard

The latest sequential discovery masterpiece from MW Puzzles made an early guest appearance at MPP a while back and, even though it wasn’t quite finalised yet, it already looked stunning… I can’t really comment on how advanced the puzzling elements were as I managed to make literally zero progress on it!

When it became available on their website, I joined the throng and secured a place in the queue when the puzzles were ready. (Having already enjoyed several of their puzzles already, I had no qualms about doing this – these guys have earned their reputation for delivering on their promises!)

A few weeks later there was an email, an invoice, some PayPal was paid and then the cutest little pinball machine in the world duly arrived in an incredibly well-packaged parcel.

How can you not love a puzzle whose instructions literally start with “Play Pinball”!?

The next two steps are (only) slightly more pedestrian (“Find your unique Issue Number” and “Win the Trophy”) before the fourth task requires you to “Have Fun!”… so you kinda have to!

The attention to detail is excellent – this diminutive machine has a working plunger for launching the balls, bumpers, working flippers (well, it had to, didn’t it?), some obstacles and scoring holes and of course the inevitable drain… the backboard has a numeric display with an issue # / 350 – currently displaying 000 – but that can’t be right…

Looking around the machine, there are a few odd holes and strange-looking thingamabobs, but prodding them and twisting them doesn’t seem to do anything…

In shipping configuration there’s a big old chunk of cork jammed into a hole on the side, removing that frees your ball bearing, ready to play…

Dropping the ball into the chute and releasing the plunger sends the ball into play and the flippers are pretty responsive and soon enough you can launch the ball around the table to more or less any part that suits your fancy… Step 1 achieved.

While just playing pinball is fun, there’s clearly a lot more to this mechanical marvel, so I set about exploring some of the less obvious “features” – I find some things far more interesting than others and begin finding some tools. At one point I’m just tootling around when a tool quite literally launches itself into the air – this little guy is full of surprises it turns out!

There’s some lovely sequential stuff in the guts of the solve where pathways open up as you progress and you find new things to explore… several times I found myself getting stuck on an element and literally imagining a breakthrough several days later only to find that at least part of what I’d dreamt up turned out to be useful and provide some forward progress…

The final stage of this puzzle tortured me for several days – like any good puzzler I kept trying the same things over and over again expecting a different outcome…”knowing” what I needed to do… only to realise about a week later that one of my assumptions was literally as wrong as it could be!

Matthew clearly understands puzzlers, and in particular, he understands exactly how to lead them right up the garden path and into a blind alley! I’d love to see the mechanics inside this little guy because there are so many little surprising interactions that don’t always seem possible… right from that very first little surprise.

This one looks stunning and it’s a cracking sequential discovery puzzle to boot! What’s not to love?

….and you get to play as much pinball as you want!