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.

Multiball

Eric Fuller makes good boxes. 

So when he announces a new puzzle box, they don’t tend to stay in the shop for very long. Multiball wasn’t an exception and sold out pretty rapidly… I managed to sneak a copy and have enjoyed getting my tiny little head around it. It took a while, but it was worth it. 

The externals are all Ash and Wenge, with a little clear bit of acrylic offering a helpful(?) window – nice contrast, and the internals are walnut and some bits of stainless steel(!). 

It purports to be a fairly honest puzzle with the clear little window supposedly there to help you work out what’s going on inside and come up with a strategy for defeating it all… but it offers a little more “help” than it ideally should – sort of like another puzzle with a similar feature that confounded me for jolly months – I thought I could see everything I wanted to, only to realise after quite a while that some of what I knew I could see was in fact a reflection or a diffraction and things weren’t quite where I thought they were… so I was a little weary at this particular little gift horse of a window. 

You can work out where the main locking mechanism is fairly quickly, and you can see its and bobs moving around and interfering with one another, you can even work out a bit of a strategy for getting some things to happen and keeping others things from happening… sadly none of this seems to have any impact on your ability to open the box. 

Think (c). And then Think (c) some more. 

Experiment with a plan in mind. Deduce what is more successful and what is less successful, and open the box. Simples…

…and if you’re doing it right, you should be able to do it repeatedly in a few seconds each time, without any luck or dexterity required…

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!