This Puzzle Box has 1024 Combinations!

in this video I'm going to show you how to open my second ever puzzle box that I made 10 years ago so when I was 15 I made this puzzle and it is the second box I ever made so here's the deal um you know you got a long box you got a top that moves slightly you got a bunch of buttons that fall out with gravity and fall back in um the bottom isn't anything special two rows of five buttons across here and this box is simply just an algorithm of getting the right combination in order to open the box and with two possible positions for each button it doubles with each button how many combinations the box has so we'd have two on the first button two possible combinations multiplied by two by the second button two four twelve thousand twenty four so 1024 combinations to open the box so the only other thing about this was you know second box I ever made I handed it to my brother and he was able to uh he was clever you know he picked up on the lid like this and then felt which buttons were getting kite and so he was able to figure out uh you know kind of cheat the box opening that way but otherwise just brute forcing this it would take you you know over 500 tries to get it typically so let me just show you the combination now I might have done that right I I sometimes good at that oh there it goes so you as you can see nothing real fancy here just kind of a 15 year old just kind of cobbling stuff together using a band saw to cut that apart you can see inside the box that's what the mechanism looks like and so for the longer pegs you have um a stop so that they don't come out as far as they do now um you know just kind of real rough stuff going on inside there but hey we have this box that came out and pushed back the lid here and inside you have a pretty substantial compartment pretty big you could fit some stuff in there so I'm going to talk about where the design went well and where it could even be improved upon because I get a lot of emails from people asking about how to get into designing puzzle boxes and where to start and so I just want to kind of give my take on this puzzle and some things good and some things bad about it that you guys might want to keep in mind if you're starting to design puzzles well let's just you know just from a box standpoint you know all your work all your puzzles actually no matter what you're doing you want to take a step back and just look at it and and you know think you know hey does this look good this box just by looks I mean hey I'd give it a you know a c or something you know it's not it's not too bad it's got some interesting wood grain here this is Cherry this is Maple and we have cherry and maple going on here and then some just eight inch plywood going on but the colors are kind of a similar Hues you know there's not too much contrast um where it's just kind of it's sort of soothing you know the Box we've got the grain cherry wood grain um it's got kind of sharp Corners they're sanded over with just a piece of sandpaper but nothing crazy and this is one of my pet peeves um Corners that are rounded over a whole bunch that's a big No-No for me I just don't like it I you know anybody can do that and at that point you know it kind of disguises whether or not you have a good straight edge across here it doesn't look as good in my opinion as a very small radius just with like one or two swipes of real fine sandpaper I just like sharper Corners like this this box I would I would say is sort of an art deco type box and you don't really wanna go outside your niche of design and add in a whole bunch of other stuff I'm not going to pull in something some sort of carving that's out of time period for the design you know or something that brings it into a different genre that wouldn't mesh well with this so you know overall I'd say you know a c on the design now let's talk about the quality of the craftsmanship [Music] um and again I'd probably give this like you know for how old I was and whatnot I'd give it a c which is pretty good for me um it's you know it's basic construction I have mitered corners here what that means is the corners are cut at 45 degrees and then joined and glued like that um the top is pretty solid we have some tight fitting joinery here that I did on the mortiser which you know not all of these are mortised right in the center and you can tell that just by looking at it but all in all it's not terrible like you know it's passable um Inside the Box um it's it's it works but it's rough you know these pieces are just glued on to here um you know T slotted and then glued onto their you know these are not it's not fancy joinery going on inside it doesn't really have to be depending on what you're making but uh you know these cuts are not nice and square they don't look straight um you know doesn't look very good on the inside and this is just totally like glue all over the place you know burn marks stuff isn't Square stuff isn't uniform the eye isn't pleased with it it looks kind of like you know garbage but so so you know the craftsmanship of the box did I say I would give you the C I don't know I'd give it more like a d okay it's it's not very good I know I was young at the time nothing really interesting is going on with the with the joinery that's really pulling you in that's making you think like this is a bomb proof box or this is a box that's going to last hundreds of years you know as soon as a glue joint fails on something here The Box is going to be broken and you're going to have to glue it together again so not great okay so here is a big one and here's where we can get into an interesting debate um this box a big problem with this box is it doesn't have a lot going for it in the sense of it doesn't draw you in as a puzzle solver this box doesn't have a lot going on as in you know visually speaking you can just see oh okay looks like the buttons are the only thing that moves and lo and behold those buttons are the only things that move and you can see that right from the get-go which means that your your brain isn't coming up with Solutions and and second guessing itself and solving a mystery as you're opening the box You're simply just solving a Brute Force code you know to hack if I brought this around and showed this to people a lot of people would take like one look at it and be like oh I could never sit through all that oh I could never do that and you know if the fact of the matter is they could but nobody wants to because it's it's just boring for many people now I will say this there are puzzle solvers that do enjoy this kind of puzzle where it's a Brute Force you have to go through and enter a combination and find the combination though that's legitimate for some people it's us it's a minority of people and so for my customers I have to do this sort of thing very seldom or make it very easy so that people can you know make progress but see that they're making progress so that they'll spend 5 10 20 minutes going through solving something like this in order to open the box um you know and it and it has to be just a small facet of the puzzle not the whole puzzle puzzle interest it just it doesn't leave your brain anything to imagine it doesn't it doesn't create any mysteries for the solver there's no hide and seek going on but we can kind of combine these two and find a convergence point where you can get a lot more people interested in your puzzle if you add a little bit of each of those things so for example this puzzle the captain's Quest has a whole lot more going on than this puzzle I mean if you had to pick up one of these you would probably pick up this one 90 you know most people would pick up this one because there's so much more going on there's a ship wheel here there's these pipes coming out of the box there's the metal coral and stuff going on and then there's even seaweed cut into the wood beneath you know there's this plunger up top that goes in oh [Music] it just automatically goes back in which is pretty amazing and something that a lot of people would like to fidget with you know that hand in hand with this ship wheel you know a lot of people are going to like feeling like they were making progress or testing things out you know things that move um you know this has things that move but it's almost all the same thing and you get bored with it in about 10 seconds um so we got screws going on we got a map in back you know there's this in the front so let's take that word out we've got wood going on here we've got the structure going on so all sorts of different things that you can explore explore with this puzzle which is why a lot of people would like this playing with this more because you know there's more hide and seek there's more imagination into the box as far as a good puzzle from a lots going on and lots that you can move and play with not very good I'd give it uh you know an F in that category so real quick last thing I'm going to contrast this box also with one of my favorite boxes if not my favorite this is the Jack-in-the-Box that I made two years ago and this puzzle is great to bring around and show people because most people will enjoy playing with this box and making progress on it and so I'll show you how this opens so basically you got the design it's another Art Deco smooth you know squares rectangles some inlay here and so the first move is this right here so you push this down and then this piece comes out now most people can't heart find this that I showed to on the first you know by themselves puzzle solvers will find it but just your ordinary Joe's won't but I give them that first move and then this comes out and then at that point they start pushing stuff around sliding stuff and then they find that this moves and then they find this moves and this moves and usually they can get to this point and then they're stuck again and that's when I tell them you know usually need to tell them to focus on this and then eventually you find that this drawer comes out and then you have a deck of playing cards inside it's just a real nice fidgety thing to play with and open and it's not too hard to where people don't even want to play with it you know especially because right from the get-go when they get this box nothing seemingly moves until you find this first button so people know that something has to move in order to open the box so that's why it's fun to initial to to in beginning play the hide and seek game of trying to find what moves and then after they find that or after I give it to them they can make some easy progress on here um and you know the the craftsmanship is really good the joints are good um it's not perfect if I was going to make more of these which unfortunately I'm not going to I would change some things obviously but uh designs well thought out it's well crafted it's not going to break easily and so you know that's what a good working puzzle looks like in my mind's eye everybody's a little different but you know these are my takes on what comprises a good puzzle box hopefully people get some good ideas from that thanks for watching the video and I'll see you again soon bye

Channel: Jesse Born

Views: 794

Keywords: puzzlebox, puzzle, box, sequential discovery, jesseborn, Chris Ramsay

Id: vOlivtJZk7o

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023