I’ve been working through my backlog of puzzles. It’s embarrassing how many unsolved puzzles I have in my collection. Some are long term projects that I pull out once in a while and work on them. Some are puzzles I never touched. Some are puzzles, still in their sealed packaging, that I haven’t even looked at yet.
The reason I’m working through the backlog is because I blew my budget on a few high end puzzles – Bach’s Box, Fáfnir’s Fortress, Jammed Coin, SDBBM 3D, ECD TRILOGY and ResQ and few others. And so, it becomes financially necessary to make this switch – that is, unless something comes out that I just can’t resist – emergency monies.
Line Up by Alexander Magyarics has been in the backlog for a bit. I bought it from Woodwonders, though I can’t seem to find it on there website – seems like that happens a lot with Woodwonders – the retired designs don’t always make it to the Gallery.
But, no matter, I pulled this one out of the stash and decided to check it out. The construction of the copy I have is unique, the walls of the cube are made up of dozens of little sticks, which give a very distinct appearance.
The solve is pretty straightforward, but not easy. There are 4 sticks over various configurations, which all have a seemingly random assortment of protruding cubes and blocks. The goal is to get all the sticks out of the box. But the box also has its share of protruding cubes. So, in order to solve this, each piece has to make multiple moves in as sort of dance within the box, that ultimately unlocks the first piece, the rest come out easily after the 1st.
Solving this one was interesting. I played with it for an hour or so, sort of fidgeting while watching tv, occasionally making progress, but I didn’t put much thought into what was happening. Eventually I got all the pieces out.
This is where things really got interesting. I knew what order I had removed the sticks, but I didn’t know where in the box these belonged, It’s fairly obvious the configuration of the pieces, but which way do they go into the box.
What followed was a good amount of fun and frustration as I tried the same thing over and over and failed over and over. I got caught up in a pattern of movements and kept thinking I was doing something different, when in fact I was just repeating the same thing. We all do this right? Anyway, I spent more than a couple hours trying to get it right.
Finally, today, I was sitting on the porch and maybe it was the good lighting, or maybe I was just sick of failing in the same way, but I found a new configuration, a new path forward and sure enough it worked. What a cool puzzle! These sorts of puzzles don’t always inspire me, but putting this one back together was a challenge and was satisfying to complete.