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Friday Slide Show: The Wooden Barrel
1 March 2024
The only games we are fond of all have officials you can curse. So this Japanese wooden barrel puzzle has sat in an open frame attached to the end of a bookcase in the studio for decades without being disturbed.
Somewhere, in some special place, we tucked away the printed solution, already aware we would need it one day. And we were not keen to take the puzzle apart for this slide show without unfolding the solution and putting it in plain sight.
But decades ago there was no Internet and no YouTube and no demonstrations about how to take anything apart and put it back together. We quickly found a video showing how to solve the puzzle and carefully stepped backward and forward through it to make sure our puzzle conformed to the genre.
You never know until it's too late, after all.
Our is the eight-piece version of what can be found in a 12-piece version as well. Perfect for our time in life when, you know, less is more.
We slide out the key piece, which deserves no medal because it's the only piece that moves. It's the rectangular piece on the end. Push it one way or the other and keep pushing until it comes out. One down.
That frees the square piece on the end next to it to slide into the vacated space where it can be removed as well. Two.
That, in turn, unlocks the top and bottom pieces, which simply slide out. Four.
From there you can remove the two pieces that form a sort of belt around the middle. Six done.
And that leaves you with the two halves, for eight pieces.
After we took a photo of all the pieces laid out like a Sunday picnic, we put the whole thing back together again. Which is, after all, the point of the exercise.
We took our sweet time dusting the stage and aligning the image in the camera before we took the shot. But the total elapsed time between the dissembled image and the assembled image was under two minutes.
We don't think that will qualify us for a MacArthur Grant but we thought we'd mention it just in case.
