Lewis Evans’ Gordian Knot

About a year ago Lewis asked if he could borrow my copy of Stickman’s Gordian Knot so I posted it down to him… a short while later it was back home again with Lewis saying he’d really enjoyed the solve and he’d done all the measuring and 3D modelling he needed to…. Given how quickly it returned, I was pretty sure that he’d been thoroughly scared off by the project. That was my first mistake.

A couple of months later there were a few more questions and the puzzle duly did another round trip to Lewis’ workshop – Lewis doesn’t scare easily, and in September he was ready to begin taking pre-orders and I wasn’t going to miss out on this one.

My copy arrived in mid-December and it looks brilliant… while the original is covered in a lattice of different coloured woods, Lewis’version is all in a single colour with a bunch of cast metal accents strategically placed about the faces. The single colour does a great job of hiding the connections between the pieces and makes the sides look far more similar and harder to differentiate. (I’m sure that wasn’t intentional!)

Finding the way in is tricky, there’s a lot to explore and only so much of it is actually useful… as I played with it memories of solving the original definitely provided some inspiration, but my memory turned out to be somewhat foggy and it ended up taking me a long time to get through to the reveal and what would have been the final step on the original… let’s just pause here for a moment and remind ourselves of just what an awesome reveal that is… you’re playing with an intricate box when all of a sardine you’re presented with something that makes sense of some stuff you’ve found earlier and you find yourself thinking “surely not?”… when indeed…

That bit of the solve literally blows everyone’s mind and it’s a wonderful thing to see the look in puzzlers’ eyes when they twig what’s about to happen… Lewis’ copy does that just as brilliantly…

But then there’s more….

Rather than being the rather wonderful end to the journey, Lewis provides just a pause, before the journey continues…!

I spent a very long time not making any progress at this stage – I was certain I knew what I wanted to happen – I just couldn’t get it to actually do anything… I tried a bunch of different things, some of them several times hoping for a different outcome (yes, yes…) and then last Sunday, I gave it to Ali partially solved and asked him to help me… and a short while later I saw him doing something I hadn’t – because, well, why would you? Except it was definitely having an impact, and a positive one at that…

Ali had it open soon after that and we examined the innards and it was very clear why what I was trying was never going to work and what Ali was clearly doing "wrong", was in fact exactly what was required…

Lewis has added a brilliant twist to the end of the original – the first part of the solution follows the original faithfully, and the last bit is just excellent.

Kudos to Lewis for taking on this project and making an already excellent puzzle even better, and then bringing a whole bunch of new copies into the community – the world definitely needs more than the original 28 Gordian Knots…

Keep Locked

I counted myself exceptionally lucky to be able to purchase a copy of Robert Yarger’s thirty sixth numbered puzzlebox – The Keep Locked. Truth be told it arrived several months ago, but I haven’t been able to blog about it until just now…

It arrived a couple of days before Gill and headed off to Boston for a couple of weeks so I managed only a little bit of playtime on a few of the evenings before we flew out. In that time managed to make a little progress but I could see that I was nowhere near completing this E.P.I.C. solve, so I reset it all back to the start position and went off on holiday… and then a few jet-lag-riddled days after we got home, I was heading up to the Northern Puzzle Party, so I made sure that I took the little fortress along with me for others to play with.

Shane ended up supervising several solvers as they wended their way through the solve and I managed to avoid spotting too many spoilers as I really wanted to have a good go at it myself, safe in the knowledge that I was going to really enjoy it.

I deliberately left it alone for a while on my desk and then ended up taking it to an MPP where a few more folks managed to solve it… and then it sat on my desk, sort of in pride of place while I furiously avoided playing with it until I knew I had enough time to really enjoy it… and that time came this afternoon – I had literally an afternoon free, and I wanted to be puzzled – kismet.

This isn’t a small puzzle – it’s more of a statement puzzle – it defies you to have a go – a bit like the 1998 hit from The Mekons. The Keep has four turrets – each colour-coded to the padlocks hanging down from them – I’m guessing that’s not a coincidence. On the front there’s a handsome lion above the heavy doors and portcullis. Around the back there’s a round Stickman logo dancing in the dawn…

I’d seen Rob’s wooden padlocks in the past but these raise the game even further – four locks in different woods – all looking a little different – waiting to be challenged. A few months ago my experience had been limited to fiddling with the locks, so I dived in there again…

Each lock literally has a personality of it’s own, some are polite and formal and others shout and kick… and once they’ve all been dealt with, there are lots of bits and pieces to keep track of.

From there on it was all new territory, and I can definitely say that things get a bit extreme from there on in… there are some seriously funky things that happen along the way, there are times when you’re up a creek without a paddle and you need to pay close attention to find the paddle that Rob’s carefully stashed for you behind some rocks.

As always, there’s a generous sprinkling of tools around and if you’re paying (very!) close attention, it’ll be clear what you need to do – a few times I found myself wondering where to head to next and only when I took stock, did I realise that the answer was right there in front of me all along…

This solve is an EPIC journey – another classic Stickman.

One Hand Puzzlebox

Towards the end of last year my fellow Fellow Asher got in touch with me and asked if I’d be interested in a copy of something he’d been developing with Robert Yarger – a quick check on whether Hades had actually frozen over yet confirmed that, abso-flipping-lutely I was interested… and then a couple of weeks later a well-protected package duly arrived in Barnt Green.

Now unfortunately in the Walker-household there is an established tradition that packages addressed to me arriving in the couple of weeks before Christmas are hijacked by management and placed under the Christmas tree – where they will wait until Christmas to be opened… and Asher’s parcel arrived solidly in the middle of said hijack-period - and so it was left under the tree for several weeks… until Christmas.

I was finally allowed to open it on Christmas morning and it’s gorgeous… a handsome box about the size of a box for storing a set of standard chess pieces in – with some lovely inlay work around the side – and an obvious sliding lid… which didn’t want to slide and I wasn’t going to force it!

I fiddled a little with it on and off over the course of the next few days, deliberately not really diving into it as I wanted to save the best for last… so I ended up working my way through the Karakuri Christmas gifts I’d received, some things from Radek, something new from Endo-san, a couple of Osanori’s and a pile of things from Wil – before eventually allowing myself to get to grips with the One Hand Puzzlebox… only I couldn’t get it to do anything – the lid would slide a tiny bit and then jam, I tried all sorts of tapping and gravity inversions before admitting to Asher that I hadn’t even been able to open the lid yet – at which point he told me that I was clearly being far too careful and I should just open the lid – and indeed a little more pressure had the lid sliding open and revealing the pieces inside – with one of them bobbing up and standing head-and-shoulders above the rest of the pieces – obviously the culprit that had me thinking the box had a lock on it.

At this point the lid will slide about halfway open and then it will stop dead – but there’s a (half) box-full of little pieces – at least one of which is begging to be pulled out… and if you do give it a tug, it will drag all of the other pieces out of the box with it… so far things seem calm and controlled…

However, as the pieces clear the edge of the box they start misbehaving rather badly – in fact, it turns out there are a large number of magnets on the pieces, most of them apparently opposing when they’re in the box, so when you tug them out, they spontaneously rearrange themselves into a shape that most definitely doesn’t fit back into the box again…

The game is afoot…

OK – so we can take the pieces apart and work out how many pieces there actually are in there – more than you might initially think, and then we need to set about working out what the goal is and how the heck we’re going to get there.

The goal is to insert the pieces, one at a time, into the box in such a way that the second compartment (remember that the lid slid halfway open and won’t slide any further) is properly unlocked.

Now the real fun starts – identifying all of the pieces and working out what their eventual positions need to be to get them back into that first compartment… then trying to work out how to put the pieces in in a manner that doesn’t involve the dexterity of a sleight of hand artist – bonus hint: if you find yourself trying to pin one piece in place with a finger while inserting another piece with the remainder of your fingers, you haven’t found the most elegant solution yet!

Playing around with those pieces is good fun – sometimes they have a mind of their own and won’t stay where you want them, but when you find just the right set of pieces, in the right order, there’s a delightful clackety-clack as you manoeuvre them into place – Asher reckons it’s quite Zen putting the pieces into place and I have to agree… certainly when you compare it to the relative chaos of the extraction process!

At this stage I found myself thinking somewhat prematurely that I’d solved the puzzle – I’d managed to bodge my way into the second compartment and thought I was done… until Asher referred me back to the original goal – specifically the bit about inserting the pieces so that the second compartment remained permanently unlocked… except that in my “solution” that definitely wasn’t the case…

There’s a wonderful further bit of puzzling that provides another great “A-Ha!” moment, or three… and then indeed, you can insert each piece and see the second compartment neatly unlock as expected… revealing a little ancient Greek coin inside the second compartment – a nod to the fact that an earlier working title for the project had been Pandora’s Box.

Thanks Asher for this incredibly generous, and delightfully puzzling, gift!

 

 

Burl Tile Puzzle aka Stickman Puzzlebox #30

This is a brute of a puzzle – another one that’s been on my shelf-of-shame for (a lot!) longer than a year now… and I finally sucked up enough courage to get it open a couple of weekends ago. 

Now in the past I’ve always maintained that there is no common theme or style among Robert’s designs, and it might seem like I’m about to contradict myself here, but give it a moment before you jump to any conclusions… the Stickman has NOT compromised any of his creative integrity by revisiting an old idea!

Right, so Puzzlebox #15 was a sliding tile pile that unlocked a box when you solved the 3D picture on the lid of the box… and Puzzlebox #4 had a funky mechanism for moving tiles between different faces of a puzzle where you needed to properly align a number of tiles to open a number of compartments… with me so far?

Burl Tile Puzzlebox asks you to solve two sliding tile puzzles on opposite sides simultaneously using a single  empty space – each side is a 3*5 matrix and the “pictures” on each side are made up of a couple of bits of sliced up burl – so you’re effectively playing an edge-matching puzzle where you aren’t sure which bits go together and where the edges are… sounds tricky?

Well remember there’s only a single hole across both sides – well one end of the box swivels, transporting burl tiles (and potentially your space) from one face to the opposite face… and if that’s not quite enough, there’s also a funky little feature that allows pieces to be spun around – so when you start trying to piece together the two lovely bits of burl, you don’t even know the pieces are properly oriented, let alone whether they belong to the same “picture” or not. 

Getting the picture of why it’s been on the shelf of shame for so long yet? 

As you begin to solve the two pictures you’ll find a number of locking key loosening up and eventually they can be removed… and you can sort of cheat by working on those keys individually… and I’m not saying I did, but I discovered that doing that actually doesn’t help at all when it comes to opening the hidden compartment – everything needs to be solved, and aligned rather jolly neatly before you open this guy up…

When it was finally opened, it needed more encouragement than usual having been allowed to “rest” for several years without being played with – it won’t have to do that again…

Oh, and if that wasn’t hard enough, Rob provides an alternative assembly that makes things even harder – to the extent that in some positions a number of tiles will actually be locked in place and cannot be moved, until you work out which other supposedly independent tiles need to get shifted around…

A proper hard puzzle that uses some really clever engineering and superb woodworking skills to bring to life a multi-layer puzzle that continues to push the boundaries of what you can expect from a modestly sized Puzzlebox.

A Traditional Stickman?

Well, sort-of!

I’ve long expressed the opinion that the one thing that you can recognise a Stickman Puzzlebox by, is the fact that you cannot recognise a Stickman Puzzlebox – they are all SO different – be it the styles, mechanisms or look of the puzzles – they are all different. So when Rob calls Puzzlebox #32, The Traditional, you can be sure he’s referring to something other than his normal style and approach – because there is no such thing. 

In this case, he’s alluding to traditional Japanese puzzle boxes – #32 is his homage to their massive contribution to the puzzle community. And he’s really gone the whole hog on this one, not only perfecting the fine art of Japanese Yosegi, but teaching his apprentice Rick to do it as well so that he could contribute some of the Yosegi panels. 

It certainly looks the part – with some wonderfully traditional Japanese Yopsegi patterns mixed in with a couple that have a distinctly more modern look to them… and the homage doesn’t just end at the decoration: Japanese puzzle boxes typically rely on interacting sliding panels to release their secrets and this one does that in spades!

In fact, when you first pick this box up and fiddle around with it, you might well be tempted to think that literally every single panel is covered with things that slide this way and that – this definitely ain’t just a traditional old Japanese puzzle box – this little guy’s on steroids!

Some gentle playing will allow you enough progress to start getting into a compartment or two… but this fella has a total of four compartments waiting to be properly discovered… and finding them all took me an inordinate amount of time…

In fact, this guy has been on my shelf-of-shame for absolute ages – gently mocking me… I could get myself about half way through the solution quite easily, but the second half eluded me… of course several of my good puzzling friends merrily opened it, pronounced it great fun and then locked it up again for me… without a single clue as to why I was getting myself so stuck…

…and then a couple of weeks ago, I decided it really needed to be joining its brothers in the new cabinets downstairs so I made a concerted effort at getting it off the shelf-of-shame… and finally succeeded in pushing through to the second half of the solution – a seriously broad smile ensued. 

This isn’t so much an homage as it's a total reimagining, keeping enough of the underlying traditional elements in there for you to recognise and to lead you up the garden path, and then adding a few kickers that really don’t behave the way any self-respecting traditional Japanese puzzle box would – like moving one panel causes another panel to move in the opposite direction!

…it kicked my backside for more than a year – and I love it for that very reason!