Kagen Sound’s Caterpillar Box

Part 2 in Kagen’s Lotus Trilogy landed recently – another wonderfully handsome creation to add to the collection.

He’s been working on the series for years now, literally, and has somehow managed to find the time to finish off the second in the series in spite of recently welcoming his daughter, Helen, into the world.

Anyone familiar with the first in the series will instantly feel at home: a series of decorative rings on the top of the box combine to form stunning patterns radiating out from the centre… the rings each contain the same repeating patterns but their interplay produces wonderfully different patterns – fun to play with on their own, even if you ignore the whole puzzle box thing underneath those rings.

The box arrives with a slightly (deliberately!) lop-sided flower design… start spinning the rings and it quickly vanishes and then bits and pieces of potential pattern come into view… as with the Lotus box, you’ll find that you can get some of the rings to line up in a particular pattern, and then discover that the last one or two won’t quite go far enough, so you head back to the start again.

There’s a brilliant sequential nature to the puzzle – you start with the first clue to a pattern, solve that one on the rings and it will unlock one of the four drawers, giving you a clue to the next pattern, and so on until the fourth drawer opens and Kagen’s branded limited edition numbering shows up on the base…

I had a wonderful time experimenting with the various patterns and can’t help but be amazed at the designs that allow four very specific patterns to unlock their respective drawers (re-)using the same set of rings over and over…

There’s nothing to stop you from simply experimenting with repeating patterns and seeing if they open a drawer – but you owe it to yourself to solve it properly from start to finish… a real thing of beauty!

Stickman No. 22 Puzzle Box: Gordian Knot

I’ve been after this one for a long time now…I’ve been reasonably successful at hoovering up copies of Robert Yarger’s older creations over the past few years and had got myself to the point of having an almost complete collection of Rob’s numbered Puzzle Boxes – I was missing just two of them… and then a friend offered me a copy of Gordian Knot. An appropriate PayPal transfer took place at light speed and shortly thereafter I was playing with my own copy…

Covered in a wonderfully colourful patchwork of no less than 130 individual little pieces of exotic wood left over from the previous half-dozen Stickman creations, this little 3-inch cube is stand-out beautiful.

A cursory examination shows lots of little pieces criss-crossing the surface in a highly unpredictable fashion. They go over and under one another on each face and often chase one another around corners. Sometimes the relative interactions among pieces are clear to the eye, and sometimes they’re hidden under a layer or two – but effectively you have a large three-dimensional Tokyo Traffic Jam – with no obvious start or end state… some pieces will move at the start, but don’t seem to unlock any further moves, which is a little odd. More often than not you’ll find yourself moving a piece and then trying to figure out what could possibly have now been released to allow the next move… and coming up blank.

Start making serious progress through the thirty odd moves required and memorably a bit will come adrift – a little alarming the first time you see it… and less so subsequently.

Somewhere along the way it turns from being a sliding block puzzle into a sequential discovery puzzle, but all the way through, it’s a very clever puzzle box.

There is a wonderful moment during every solver’s journey where you spot something really interesting and your tools transmogrify into exactly the sort of thing you most need right at that moment, unlocking the door to your final discovery.

Absolute genius!

…now if any of my other friends out there would like to part with a Stickman Lighthouse, do get in touch so that I can complete my collection! :-) 

Juno’s Quartet Box

Named after the four attractive cogs on the top of this box, Quartet Box is a veritable little fortress to get into…

It seems Juno really enjoyed making the cogs for his Ixia boxes a little while back and made a few more, albeit to a slightly different scale. They sit on top of a square box whose sides appear to be made up of sticks, some of which may move a fraction… perhaps that’s a clue?

Those cogs will turn and unless you’ve never played with a magnet before, you’ll instantly recognise the forces at play in different places as you spin the cogs… and it’s therapeutic.

Experiment a little more and you’ll discover that the cogs are just “attached” magnetically so they all come off and can be rearranged… have I just done something very silly?

Spend a while investigating and you’ll find you can get some things to behave a little more orderly and actually get the top to start lifting off the box a little – but things are a little weird at this point… and they get weirder a you get closer to taking the lid off… it quite a fun bit of the process.

Having taken the lid off there’s one obvious place to go, and it’s clear what you need to do; only nobody has fingers that small!

At this point the story gets a little interesting – I had taken it along to our last MPP and a few of the guys had remarked that they weren’t too happy about the final part of the solve – convinced they’d probably cheated… and it turns out they had, big time!

As always, Juno provides a wonderfully elegant solution to the final little hurdle – you just need to trust in Juno and keep puzzling – I’m very glad I did – that last step really blew me away!

Good news – when I wrote this(!) Juno still had a copy of his Quartet box available for sale on his website.

...AND it's entered in this year's Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition! 

3 Wise Bolts

A rather overdue write-up. 

Considering I’ve been sitting on this wonderful puzzle for virtually a year, it’s nice to finally be able to write about it…

I was given a sneaky copy of this puzzle when Brian and Sue were visiting ahead of going over to Paris for IPP37.  It’s been played with a fair amount at several MPPs over the past year and several visiting puzzlers have had it foisted upon them with the line “You’ll like this…”. But up until fairly recently, it hadn’t been for sale so I had to keep this little gem to myself. 

It’s now available on Brian’s website over here. 

It’s an absolute corker. 

OK, so what is it?

Brian describes it as a sequential discovery puzzle, but I should probably warn you that it’s in fact a box – cue Kevin’s excuses – there are a couple of small compartments locked away inside… well locked away. 

At the start you are presented with what appears to be a few bits of woods that are bolted together with three rather large YB bolts – no cheap shots about Brian Young being from down under, right! The “nuts” on those bolts appear to be round and rather unhelpfully countersunk into the bottom plank… and at the start the bolts appear to turn freely – as do the “nuts” – so you don’t really get anywhere by doing that…

Closer inspection shows a few small holes all over the place and playing around with the nuts some more locks them up, sometimes… GAME ON!

Some exploration will begin unearthing some potentially interesting tools and with a little thought you’ll work out how to get the first couple of bolts freed… that last bolt, however is another story entirely. 

I’ve watched grown puzzlers virtually reduced to tears at this point… they know what they have to do, they’ve done it a few times already on this puzzle, but they cannot do it again one last time…

Truth be told, that last step is really what the whole puzzle is about – everything up until then is just an interesting little interlude leading you up the garden path to the real deal (to mix a few metaphors). They sucker you into thinking that you know where this is all leading… and then Brian (figuratively) punches you in the stomach.

…but when you do get to your moment of “A-Ha!” it is wonderfully sweet… well worth the struggle along the way.