Smacking Moles Is Fun But...

After A While I Had To Use Some Pliers!

Smack-N Moles by Stickman

In 2023, Chinny collaborated with Robert Yarger to make a fabulous exchange puzzle, the "Smack-N Moles" puzzle box. Chinny gave it away to about 100 people in IPP40 at which I was not present. Luckily for a whole bunch of us who couldn't make it, there were more available direct from Stickman's website and I eagerly jumped at the chance to buy. My copy arrived in October of 2023 and has been in my second (or maybe third or fourth 😱) pile of puzzles to be solved. This time, my pile in the conservatory at the back of the house. I tend to sit there in the mornings at weekends and when off work and play with puzzles in the south-facing warmth. Sometimes I fall asleep, sometimes I play...I seldom seem to solve anything! The Smack-N Moles has been in that pile, played with weekly for about 18 months! I was beginning to get desperate. I felt a little bad for my failure but, in my defence, remember that I really seldom do puzzle boxes and don't really have a repertoire of the types of moves that they often need. Also in my defence, I note that Allard received his at the IPP in August and the write up was only published in December. Now, Allard is a huge Stickman aficionado with one of the few complete collections in the world and I am absolutely certain that despite receiving a lot of puzzles at the exchange, he will have made a beeline straight for this one and if it took him a few months then I can feel OK about taking 18 months!

This is a nice diminutive little box at 3.5x3x2.5" in size and my copy is made from Walnut. The aim is to open the box and release the moles. These cute little critters are engraved on the top of some Maple dowels that appear to be locking the sliding lid. Poking at a mole makes one or more of the others pop up when that one sinks down. You are given a tethered hammer to Smack/whack the moles but I doubt very many people are going to solve it by using the hammer that way. The hammer is tied onto the box by a loop of wire that is the perfect length to prevent the hammer being removed. Initially all you can do is poke at the moles and see whether there is a sequence of presses that will allow all the moles to be sunk below the surface of the lid.

I am slightly ashamed to say that I pushed and poked and even grabbed and pulled at the various moles for quite a long time trying to work out the sequence to release the lid. When I say a long time, I mean months! BLUSH! Remember that I am not terribly bright - it says so all over this website, so it must be true. At some point, I can't remember when, I managed to find a tool to be used but absolutely nowhere to use it so I carried on poking at moles and achieving nothing. I grew desperate - it's really quite frustrating to have a tool and nowhere to put it! I ended up shaking the box gently which also did nothing until I shook it in the right direction.Suddenly something happened and I was able to notice another "feature". After playing with said "feature" for a few minutes, I managed to manipulate it to get me a hole. At last! I had somewhere to put my tool. Now, now, keep your minds out of the gutter (especially you, Steve). I stuck my tool in the hole and wiggled it about and even rotated it for a while. Nothing happened, but it was very satisfying. Eventually, sticking your tool in a hole and swivelling it starts to get boring when there is no response - maybe it is my technique?

Here I stayed for over a year! On almost a weekly basis for a very long time I played with my tool to no good effect. I was getting to the point of maybe asking Shane for a clue when I had one of those rare thoughts© - maybe I should try this thing...   Nope, that didn't work and I stopped trying for another few months. 

Last week after continuing to think© I reached the conclusion that I had tried everything possible and something was stuck. I decided it was time for the big guns. Well actually a medium pair of pliers. Yes, I know, no external tools allowed but I had come to the conclusion that the next part of the mechanism was stuck solid on my copy and I had nothing much to lose. Needless to say, When you use brute force and pliers, things tend to loosen. Once my heart rate had settled a little, I found that I had a new tool and also a new set of things to try. Exploring with this tool revealed something very interesting and a possible way to make the two tools I now had interact with each other.

After a few moves something interesting was happening to all the moles and before long I had my wonderful long-awaited Aha! moment! Such a relief.

Moles are free and the box is open

I was now free to look at the mechanism properly and it is really quite clever. It really isms terribly difficult but the movement of the moles is designed to make you think all the wrong things and lead you in the wrong direction. 

The reassembly is significantly fiddly but knowing how it works means that a bit of perseverance is required. I then had a look at the piece that needed pliers and realised that some lacquer had gotten onto it and effectively fused it in place. There was absolutely no way that I was ever going to shift that without using my tool. This means that you can stop berating me! 

I can finally put another puzzle away and this will join my small, but well-loved, Stickman collection. I have missed out on the subsequent releases but I am ever-hopeful that Robert will let me buy another one sometime. 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻

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A little underwhelming?

Finally, with a little encouragement (but no real clues from Goetz) I can finally say that I have completed the Ages sequential discovery burr having found the compartment that contains the piece of Lightning Ridge opal. The opening of that compartment requires construction of a very clever tool and using it to manipulate the cover in a counter-intuitive way. It is classic Brian! Thank you my friend. I can finally put it away after so many years!

In the right light the pearlescent opal colours do shine

A Simply Incredible Gift!

It lasted a year!

         The Stickman(no 35) - the One Hand PuzzleBox aka Pandora's Box

At the end of 2020 I received a fabulous gift from the incredibly generous Asher Simon. I offered money but Asher wouldn't say yes and insisted that this was a gift for the effort I had put into my blog and he wanted to know my opinion of it as a puzzle. He had been working on it for quite some time with Robert Yarger aka Stickman. After I said yes thank you lots and lots of times and offered again to pay, I waited and watched the tracking and waited and waited. It arrived in the UK and got stuck somewhere. Now, those of you who have had dealings with customs department will all get that chill in your bones. 

Instructions/Info included

I don't know what they saw but I guess their X-ray machine may have thrown up some red flags. There are, after all, a LOT of magnets in this puzzle and Asher had said there was something inside especially for me (maybe this enticed them as well?) After being held hostage for quite a few weeks my package arrived with another sign to chill the bones...there was the "inspected by customs" tape on the box. In the meantime, Allard had already received his copy and solved and reviewed it. He is a MUCH better puzzler than me which is another reason that I have had to wait the best part of a year to be able to write about it. Mrs S kept the package in quarantine for a few days, as she has for all our post since the pandemic began. I can't really argue with her logic and am too frightened of her to even think about it.

Slide the lid and a grenade pin pops up!
The box lid will not slide any further

A few days after it arrived I got to open the box where the full horror of the situation was revealed. Customs had slid open the box, and pulled all the pieces out and then proceeded to try and force things back in and tried to force the mechanism. OMG! Instead of 9 pieces, I had 11 and a very unhappy PuzzleMad. I couldn't even work out where the broken pieces were supposed to fit together...Sob! I reported the catastrophe to Asher and he was mortified! It was not his fault at all but he felt guilty and was determined to make it all good. Luckily for me he had a spare copy which he packed up and a couple of months later sent out to me with dire warnings for the customs department and he included a set of instructions/solution specifically for the customs meatheads so that they would not need to force anything like they had before. This time it arrived completely untouched by any other human hands. Thank goodness for that! I take the obligatory photos and marvel at the design and craftsman prowess that went into making this. The lid slides inone direction only and meets a little resistance. Encouraged by the comment to Allard that a little force is required to open the lid, I gave it a push and could see that presumably a hollow in the lid had housed a bevelled piece that was pushing up into it. The little force pushed the lid over that bevel and what can only be described as a grenade pin pops up. Oh boy, the temptation is huge! Do I pull that pin? What will happen? Hopefully nothing will break. 

Whilst part of me wants to just admire the puzzle for the rest of eternity, that is not going to help me solve it or even understand why it's a puzzle. It's time to be a brave little boy and pull the pin:

After the "explosion" there are 9 pieces with lots of magnets pushing and pulling all over the place. 

Look at the precision of those pieces! Look at all those magnets!

Even arranging the pieces so that I could take the photo was a challenge...they kept moving and either clicking together or repelling out of the correct placement. No Stickman box is complete without the Stickman logo somewhere inside and here it is - branded onto the beautiful wood box.

The usual logo inside the box

OK, here goes! Not only is it a box but it's also a packing puzzle. Apparently, if I pack the pieces back in and get them in the correct orientation then the magnets will trigger a hidden mechanism that will unlock the covered compartment. Yay! This should be fun. But let us not forget that I am rubbish at boxes, rubbish at packing puzzles and generally rubbish at puzzles! Mrs S often asks why I keep buying puzzles that I cannot solve and I shake my head and tell her that I don't know - I have to own up that I have an addiction. My name is Kevin and I am addicted to puzzles! There, I feel much better for that.

One of the main "features" of this challenge comes from the name..."one hand". Yes that dastardly designer did not just make a complex 3D packing puzzle which would be tough enough for a man of my limited skills. He also insisted that this puzzle should be solved using just ONE HAND! OMG! I discovered almost immediately that the way I thought some of the pieces should fit together was quite difficult - they really wanted to spring apart from each other and as soon as I added an extra piece or two, I found that either I didn't have enough fingers or my joints didn't point in the right direction to hold everything together - maybe it should be called the Stickman double-jointed box? After a few days of attempting the impossible I read the rest of the instructions and realised that I had been doing it all wrong (this explains quite a bit of my home life). The puzzle should not be solved by dexterously holding together a bunch of repelling pieces before stuffing them in the box - they can/should be inserted into the box with one hand one piece at a time. Aaargh it gets harder and harder! The last paragraph of the instructions says:

"This puzzle is far more diabolical than it appears"

No kidding! I have spent MONTHS on this - it has been sitting on my desk since it arrived in March. I have had it right next to me ever since then so that every week after writing my blog, I can pick it up and try again and again. Hell! For most of the last 9 months I have been completely unable to put the pieces back into the box! Yes, it is that difficult. At some point during the first couple of months I spent a happy few hours making a Burrtools file from the pieces so that at least I might be able to leave the pieces in place. Except, to my horror, I discovered that there are 900 different assemblies of those 9 pieces in the box cavity! In the end I had to go back to my photos to and the video to at least find how to put the puzzle back to the start. Yep, this might take me quite some time.

One thing that bothered me about reading Allard's review was that he mentioned a distinct Aha! moment and I had not come even close to one of those in many months. I was not trying to exhaustively work my way through the BT solutions as that might be construed as cheating and to me was just too much like hard work...especially as I frequently had to retrieve pieces from under my chair as they shot off when I ran out of fingers in my "one hand" to hold them inside. What was I missing?

In the end I opened up Asher's beautifully illustrated solution book which he had left for the customs guys should they need it. It walked me through the reassembly back to the beginning. Well that was very nice but wasn't getting me into the second compartment. Over the last few months I have become quite accomplished at reassembling the puzzle back to the start (I must have done it 50 or 60 times).

Last week, I looked at the next page of the booklet which I had been studiously avoiding and OMG! You sneaky bugger! How had I missed that? Rule number one of puzzling...Look at everything, don't trust the designer at all, things are often not what they seem. The booklet showed me something new and I had a whole new avenue of puzzling open to me. Immediately after that Aha! moment there was another. I think that if you don't try something straight away then you might get lost amongst the possibilities but luckily I did and then I made a major breakthrough. Sheer genius! 

The lid is off and there is a very ancient coin inside

It appears that this is an ancient Greek coin because Pandora's box is Greek mythology. I do wonder whether it was this coin that might have excited the customs officers and made them take my puzzle apart.

The mechanism of the lock is absolutely ingenious and absolutely foolproof. It works every single time.  If you are offered the chance to play with one or even better, to buy one than jump at the chance - it is a Stickman and it has been designed by a master.

Asher, thank you so much for a whole year of excitement, complete with highs and lows and a monumental Aha! moment. This is probably one of the most difficult puzzleboxes that I have ever seen. It will certainly end up in my top puzzles of 2021!

 

Robert Sends a Twofer Which Scares Me!

The Incredible Stickman Dwemer Construct Puzzlebox

Well, here I am running late! Mrs S has been away most of the week visiting the outlaws and, as is usually the case, she times it for just when my workload goes through the roof! I think she does it on purpose! Instead of having plenty of time, home alone, to play with all my toys and write a nice blog post, I have been up to my eyeballs in work and even spent all day yesterday writing our on-call rotas! I only just finished up this puzzle this morning after doing all the chores that "she who scares the bejeezus out of me" had set for me to do before she gets home.

Yes! It's a box! And No! I was not tricked into purchasing it! My cardinal rule is if I have the opportunity to buy a box from Stickman (aka Robert Yarger) then I just hand over the cash! Mrs S doesn't know that but let's not tell her, shall we? This particular box was offered out quite some time ago and it took Robert a good bit longer to complete the design and make the batch than expected. The wait was more than worth it! It really adds something to my little collection:

My Stickmen (including a Stickboy and a Stickman apprentice) - plus a few other beauties.

The Dwemer Construct Box is named after an ancient lost race in the Elder Scrolls, well known for their skills in crafting mechanical items.

This incredible construction is big...REALLY big and pretty damned heavy too. It has a handy top rail which is perfect for carrying it about. Every time I played with it I lugged it out of the display cabinet and then put it back after I had got stuck - Mrs S would not tolerate it being left lying around in the living room!

Looking at it closely it is clear that a huge amount of work has gone into it and pretty much all of it is crafted from wood with only a few well place brass screws holding components together. Lots of things turn and can interact with other pieces in mysterious ways. Not all are visible either - requiring a fair bit of deduction/guesswork during the process. It is very quickly apparent how the lid is attached to the box and what is required to allow that lid to be removed...the issue is making it happen! None of the appropriate parts are able to move in appropriate directions as they are blocked by other parts of the puzzle.

I worked on this, on and off, for a couple of months and kept getting stuck. They always come with a wonderful spiral-bound booklet but I try not to use that unless absolutely necessary. My stubbornness has left my Stickman Perpetual Hinge unsolved for more than 5 years! There are four phases to the solution of this puzzlebox and I got the first within a day or so. Step 2 took me over a month and then the others the same again. Some of the moves require a bit of a leap of faith..."Am I really supposed to be able to do that?" Eventually, (yes I did peek at the booklet just once) I had the release mechanisms all aligned correctly and I gently lifted the lid off to see why the puzzle had been making so many rather loud rattling noises whenever I picked it up and moved it from display to living room:

Inside is a bag of bits - including a screwdriver!

I said this puzzle is a Twofer! Robert did us proud with this one and this explained the delay. Not only do we have a beautiful large complicated box to solve but we have all the pieces inside to construct a second challenge - "two fer the price of one"! In fact, this was very nearly a "threefer" - he has ideas for another challenge but did not have time to make it - it is possible that the third challenge is made available sometime in the future (obviously we all expect to pay for it if it happens). After the solution to challenge one is a rather startling page in the booklet:

OMG - I'm gonna have to be brave!

This morning I spent a happy hour or so playing with my bag of bits and the screwdriver - this left me with a rather horrific worksurface with even more bits than I would have believed possible:

OMG - I have locked the cats out of the room! I can't afford any mishaps here!

The quality is simply stunning - everything is so perfect. The instructions for the disassembly and new assembly are step by step and quite easy. I have a small issue with an alignment of one piece in the new challenge that I am waiting for an answer from Robert but I suspect I have made a schoolboy error.

Even seeing the construction process for the second challenge amazingly does not give away how to actually solve it! I know how some of the pieces interact but have no idea how to open the box.

Probably another 3 months to solve this one!

I'll keep you informed of my progress through challenge two.

Now Mrs S has just arrived home from Edinburgh and I had better finish this and pay her some attention - if I don't then we may not make it our 25th anniversary and I won't be allowed to keep the Berrocal Goliath that is my present for lasting so long. Plus, I actually think I could do with a little bit of relaxation for the rest of the weekend - what little is left!