MiSenary Puzzle Box

Gentle readers, 

A friend of mine is trying to raise some money for a really good cause: Cancer Research in The Netherlands. He’s auctioning off a copy of his entry in last year’s Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition – the MiSenary Puzzle Box – or Michel’s Senary Puzzle Box.

I first got to see a prototype of this puzzle at Wil’s King’s Day Puzzle Party last year and it thoroughly confounded me. It was a totally enclosed box and you could sometimes hear things moving backwards and forwards when you fiddled around with the orientation… and sometimes it sounded like those things were moving further, and sometimes shorter… 

I fiddled with it for a while and didn’t feel like I was making any progress whatsoever… so gave it back to Michel, who then opened it and showed me the insides… and I rather liked what I was seeing inside there, but my dodgy hearing meant that I wasn’t able to distinguish the nuances of what was going on inside there… and feared it would be pretty hard work trying to deduce what was going on inside there in order to solve it blind the first time… so we had a bit of a chat about it and we suggested adding  window along one side… and a few months later a window had indeed been added to the lower part of the box – and I think this makes a massive difference to the playability of the puzzle. 

The little window allows the puzzlists to see things wandering backwards and forwards and even allows some deduction about what you can’t see, which is rather crucial to the solving of this puzzle… 

…and I wouldn’t be spoiling the puzzle at all by calling out that the name tells you it’s Michel’s Senary (MiSenary) Puzzle Box… there is an n-ary locking mechanism keeping the lid from opening and you need to find how to manipulate the various parts of the lock through a reasonable number of steps to finally allow the lid to be removed… you can see elements of your progress through that neat little window on the side, and you can easily see if your going the “right way” through the n-ary sequence thanks to the labels on the sides of the window… all good additions to improve the puzzle's enjoyment, IMHO. 

If you’re allergic to boxes, it is clearly an n-ary puzzle with a cavity… if you don’t have that problem, this is a neat little puzzle box with an interesting n-ary locking mechanism… either way, this is the last one that Michel will be selling – he’s had enough of the schlepp of fettling these things together and reckons he’s highly unlikely to make any more of them… so if you want one, you need to be generous to a couple of Dutch cancer charities – it’s currently listed for sale on Puzzle Paradise and remember that none of the proceeds are going to Michel or the auction site – everything goes to cancer research. 

Please bid generously!

Gouge Packing Puzzle

John Devost makes some gorgeous puzzles and from time to time he’ll sell a few of them on Puzzle Paradise. A little while back he posted a couple of copies of the Gouge Packing Puzzle, designed by fellow Canadian Gaétan Gouge. The first thing that caught my eye was the absolutely stunning woods that John had used … and knowing from experience that John’s craftsmanship is superb, it took only a couple of seconds to hit the Buy Now button. 

When it arrived, I was over the moon – John’s attention to detail is fanatical, right down to bevelling not just the edges of the box, but the corners as well … and then there’s the trademark Devost slipfeathers as well…

Right, enough gushing about how beautiful it is – tell us about the puzzle!

Inspired by the famous Hoffmann Packing Puzzle, Gaétan wrote about this puzzle in Cubism For Fun [Issue 33] back in 1994, explaining that he’d sought to use voids in the puzzle as an intrinsic part of the puzzle itself. The challenge is to pack a total of 26 cubes into the box so that nothing projects above the lip of the box. There are 21 cubes of unit size 5 and the rest are 8 units cubed. All of these cubes need to be packed into the box which is 18 units cubed internally. 

I started out by randomly experimenting with various combinations of big and small cubes and managed to find some useful interactions between the size of the box and the sizes of the cubes – that’s got to be useful! 

Surely??

Time and time again I’d manage to find a way to get them all inside the box only to find a couple of errant blocks hiding on the desk behind a burr or something. Eventually I went back to basics and worked with what I knew – what would be efficient – and what wouldn’t be – and how to make use of the fact that there we a strange number of larger cubes … and then it all makes sense, as long as you can see it all in three dimensions … it really is more about managing the voids than fitting the pieces in. 

This one’s really interesting and makes you think outside the box, in a sense. And when you find the solution, it all seems so obvious, as long as you’re thinking about it in the right paradigm.

Don't Shout Box

Family Portrait

A while back (yikes!...in 2011…) I really enjoyed playing with Phil Tomlinson’s Always Empty Box which I’d acquired via Puzzle Paradise. Previously I’d seen pics of Phil’s rather awesome puzzle cabinets – where the entire display cabinet is one big puzzle box with some pretty well-hidden tricks and locks that need to be defeated in order to get into your puzzle stash.

The Always Empty Box was delightful and a real departure from anything I’d seen before in a puzzle box. The mechanism was pretty unusual and a couple of the moves really took me by surprise.

…so when Phil posted a pic on FaceBook of a new design he was calling the Don’t Shout Box, I paid careful attention. A few copies were listed for auction on Puzzle Paradise a few days later and I piled in to make sure that I managed to snag one of the first few copies available. There was plenty of interest in them and I was well-chuffed a couple of nights ago when I came home to find my Don’t Shout Box waiting for me to play with.

There’s a very clear family resemblance to the Always Empty Box - they look almost identical, they're made from the same woods (mainly curly maple and black walnut) and they’re both decorated with a pair of red inlaid curves on the top. the only difference is that Don't Shout has an additional inlaid maple stripe between the red curves. They look great next to one another.

On my initial casual fiddling I spotted a few rather curious extra lines on the sides that I hadn’t expected – although, in fairness, there were some pretty similar lines on the Always Empty Box - memory is not my strongest point. My next couple of discoveries were a bit more along the lines of what you might expect from this sort of a puzzle box, although they weren’t really where I was expecting them… 

…and the next couple of moves are pretty darned unusual – I definitely didn’t see those coming! 

And even the final act of opening the box has a lovely little twist to it that might just hold up the unwary a little longer than necessary.

Having opened the box, you should understand where the box gets its name from – it’s a lovely little tip of the hat and a cute little hint that was there all along, only you wouldn’t have recognised it as such until it was too late to be useful. Clever. 

Phil has followed up a terrific first puzzle box with another great design. I think his latest creation throws in some neat new ideas and a couple of twists on some older ones. I really hope that Phil can be convinced to keep channelling his clearly excellent skills at crafting wood into new little puzzle boxes for us addicts, err, collectors – because he clearly has some fantastic ideas judging from the first two boxes he’s given us.

If it’s not thoroughly obvious, I reckon the Don’t Shout Box is a great puzzle box. Phil still has some available for sale, so if you’re interested in bagging one, get in touch with him via FaceBook, or if you’re allergic to that, drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with him.

Ferris’ Box

(Nope, that’s not a typo!)

Ferris’ Box was Peter Wiltshire’s entry in the 2012 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition and he duly went and won a Jury First Prize for his trouble. It’s a great puzzle box, superbly crafted by a bloke who clearly loves his hobby.

I really enjoyed playing with the Design Competition puzzle – not so much because it was a difficult puzzle to solve, but because it was so darn unusual and a really rewarding puzzle. 

There was a lot of chat about the puzzle at IPP and I’m sure that I was one of many people who were pestering him about making some more… at that stage he’d made a run of them to serve as his contribution to the Apothecary Chest and as an entry into the design competition – with a few spare copies already having been dispatched to some very deserving homes.

There was clearly more than enough demand around for them so Peter managed to convince himself to make another short run, albeit in different wood this time around in order to differentiate them from the earlier run … and so it came to pass that John Devost announced that a number of maple and purple heart Ferris’ Boxes would be auctioned on Puzzle Paradise – and I duly joined the queue of enthusiastic bidders.

Now I’m sure there’s some clever economic theory that would tell me how best to place my bids on the auctions (there were a number of overlapping auctions for essentially identical puzzles) in order to maximise my chances of getting a box at the lowest price, however I wasn’t going to take any chances and made sure that I took one really early on in the process rather than lurking and hoping to snag a (relative) bargain… and a short while later a well-packed box from Canada dropped on the porch.

At first glance it looks like a purple heart Rubik’s cube captured inside a maple cage – except that all of the usual sorts of movements that you might attempt don’t really do anything at all…

Finding the first move is a bit of a surprise.

The second move is pretty darn unusual…

…and the third move is very cute!

It’s “only” a three-move box, but it’s brilliant! Those moves will put a smile on the most jaundiced of puzzlers and Peter’s workmanship is simply stunning, so the moves are beautifully hidden.

I am delighted that I finally managed to get my hands on one of these after enjoying it so much in Washington in 2012 … I love watching puzzlers faces when they start playing with it – when they find the first move there’s a flicker of delight, at the second there’s serious respect for the craftsman and the third is the icing on the top.

Peter added a little something extra to the auction versions, tossing in a little artefact that served as the original inspiration for the design, along with a couple of PDF files explain the design and manufacture process and giving a rather unique view of the innards that you won’t ever get to see…

Very chuffed to have snagged one of these…. Thanks for making a few more, Peter!