Puzzling Issues

-

 


I've been working on fulfilment of my newest puzzle box for the last few months. Loki's box of tricks has a number of puzzles locked in layers inside the box itself. As you solve each puzzle you progress to the next layer down until you get to the bottom of the box and your just rewards. Backers from my kickstarter campaign are still waiting for the box itself but a lucky few people have had the chance to play the whole game and this has led me to some interesting and tough decisions.


The final puzzle inside the box is a 6 piece board burr puzzle, once the burr is solved you're able to match the letters up to the code symbols and decode the messages in the box. It's a bit of a tricky solve requiring 24 moves so I set the puzzle up with some sign posting to show players the starting position. My issue is that the few people who have played the game have struggled even with the sign posting. I know they're mostly word puzzlers and definitely not mechanical puzzlers (no offence if they read this) but also a lot of my backers aren't mechanical puzzlers so it has me worried about the difficulty. It rather ruins the flow of the game because you get down to the third level, get massively stuck and put the box to one side, right before an AHA moment. When you finally get round to solving it all the momentum and enthusiasm is gone.

At the same this puzzle is proving a bit tricky to manufacture. I'm using 6mm ash veneer MDF and for whatever reason it seems to vary in hardness so it's not all cutting cleanly. If I turn the power up I get a lot of char and it's even worse if I have to cut the sheet twice to get all the way through. Some of it isn't entirely flat so the two sides for each burr piece have to be clamped and pressed. It's not all consistent thickness so after all that sometimes the pieces just don't fit between each other. I've been left with a very tough decision to redesign the puzzle and find a suitable alternative.


In steps the new Jormungandr puzzle to be a replacement. This puzzle had some very specific boots to fill and I think it's done a reasonable job. In a solved state it has to draw a connection between letters and symbols. It has to have an ouroboros snake theme. It has to fit in a game just 13mm wide and it has to be easier than the burr puzzle it's replacing.

Sure it's another tray puzzle and I really didn't want to do a tray puzzle in this box but I'm going to give my backers the choice between the difficult burr puzzle and the slightly easier tray puzzle. I'm hoping there will be a roughly equal split between the two especially because I've made 200 of the burr puzzles already.

Popular posts from this blog

Wiring the Ruida Controller

-
Image
The RDC6442G controller from Ruida This is going to be quite an image heavy post describing the rewiring needed to convert between the Leetro controller and the Ruida controller. It is also pretty straight forward on the old Just Add Sharks laser cutters because all of the wires are clearly labelled. The controller was prepared in the previous step in order to make this conversion process as smooth as possible. The Leetro (Pad03) panel on the left and the Ruida panel on the right The view from inside the laser looking up at the control panel The control panel is an easy place to start, both panels have just a single cable that runs down to the controller, both panels are a very similar size, with the Ruida panel being slightly smaller underneath so it will fit in the hole left behind easily. The Pad03 panel clips into place so you'll need to reach up inside the machine to work the clips loose. The cable runs down the inside of the laser and is cable tied onto mounti
Read more

Laser Cut Cryptex

-
Image
This is my laser cut cryptex. It features 28 different characters and 9 rings, giving a total possible 10.5 Trillion different combinations. I took a bit of time developing the design so that I could add some nice features. This cryptex file is laid out so that you can have any number of rings in your own design. The best feature is that the codeword is changeable, each locking ring has an outer letter ring that can be placed in any one of the 28 different positions. Once the rings are back in place the ring locking bars can added and they prevent the rings from being modified until the box is open again. It's a bit hard to explain so I made a video showing how it all work ( svg here ) It took a long time to assemble this so I lived with my initial design choices but if I were to remake it I would adjust the file to make the ring locking bars out of 6mm ply and maybe put some blind holes onto the code rings to prevent the code being brute forced.
Read more

Rainbow Puzzle Box

-
Image
This is a binary sequence puzzle box built from 3mm birch plywood, it uses a Gray code pattern to ultimately align all the dials into a rainbow pattern before the lid can be removed. It's actually a redesign of a puzzle inside Loki's box of Tricks  because I thought it would make a cool stand alone puzzle box. The files are available for sale in my Etsy store . ( svg here ) The puzzle consists of five interlocking disks that can only rotate when the disks either side of it are in the correct position to allow it. The large wheel in the middle and the disks on the underside of the lid further restrict the rotation of the disks. The large wheel must be pointed to the disk that is being rotated and the large wheel is in turn restricted from pointing to the smaller disks depending on alignment. Once all the disks are aligned into the full rainbow the large wheel is completely free to rotate and can be turned to the edge of the box and allows the lid to be removed. There is a very
Read more