Bach’s Box

 

I’ve been a fan of Luke Waier’s puzzles since I first stumbled across his Chained Key Puzzle, and then Fáfnir's Fortress made it onto my top three picks for 2025. His mechanisms are really interesting and his use of 3D printing combined with interesting bits and bobs of hardware makes for strong puzzles at a really good price point… so I didn’t waste much time considering the options when he announced Bach’s Box in the shape of a dinky little upright piano.

This one’s another great-looking puzzle consisting of a piano and a stool, both with mirror-finished piano black panels and brass and stainless steel accents. This puzzle looks way better than its price point suggests it should and I think that it says a huge amount about Luke’s commitment to making good-looking objects as well as brilliant puzzles.

Bach’s Box comes with a polishing cloth to keep those panels shiny and smooth (and get rid of the inevitable fingerprints after a good playing with) and it displays beautifully.

Puzzling-wise, it is terrific! From the get-go there’s a bunch of interesting things to investigate and some of them might actually do something useful – I’m a fairly destructive sort of puzzler and found myself just taking as much of it apart as I possibly could and while I had great fun doing that, I invariably ended up with more pieces than strictly necessary… everything goes back together when it needs to though…

From fairly early on in the solve, things start coming apart in great chunks and presenting you with what can only be termed tools… even if they don’t appear to be actual tools! I found quite a few things that I wanted to do and couldn’t, only to realise later that I just hadn’t released the correct tools yet… patience is always rewarded.

The last step or two in the puzzle are totally in keeping with the theme, things happen exactly as they ought to, presenting you with a lovely little musical treasure to mark the end of your puzzling journey.

It’s definitely worth keeping track of everything on the reset to make sure you don’t end up with some spare bits at the end when everything’s (almost!) all reassembled again.

Luke’s definitely got a great mind for puzzle design but his ability to bring them to life in a really cost-effective and yet thoroughly beautiful way is impressive. Kudos, sir!