The Tippenary Mystery Tour
Jack Krijnen, 30 copies, 4.5″ x 5″ x 5.3″
Lalalalalalalalalalalaaaaaa…… The Tippenary Mystery Tour is coming to take you away… coming to take you away, take you awaaaaaaaaay!
I have been politely and patiently cyberstalking Jack Krijnen for some time now, particularly after learning that he had begun working on his second puzzle box; after some months of his newest creation being teased, I was happily surprised to get an email from him with the chance to get a copy of this new, limited box release of 30 copies. Needless to say, my answer was a resounding “yes, please!” and the package was soon on its way across land and sea and into my eager, puzzling hands.
TTMT is a truly fun and unique puzzling experience: the only negative is that it is so hard to talk about it without giving anything away as you are initially able to see only a very small portion of the puzzling the box ultimately contains. Jack described it by saying that it is “sequential (puzzle) discovery, it is riddle solving, it is n-ary, and in the end there is a challenge waiting.” This is, of course, all perfectly accurate, but the unique, genre-blending nature of its multi-tiered puzzle experience is hard to communicate; if only there were a puzzler capable of speaking at length without communicating much of anything at all.… perhaps someone with a good (?) sense of humor and an arbitrary rating system….
The box is pretty sizable, and Jack puts the majority of its interior space to use. Looking at pics, you can discern how to first approach its initial puzzle, and such discernment is likely to yield results; however, the puzzle is going to subtly play with expectations before granting progress and this was true for me from the start. I’d soon descended deeper into the box, arriving at its next challenge, which is a really fun blend of riddling and multiple puzzle types that makes for a very original challenge.
There were several ways to approach this next section, and all of them were going to require some good, old-fashioned thinking (and more than a little note-taking) to make sense of it. Figuring out what means what and what needs to happen is only half the fun, as execution is at least as challenging. I’d found that while some of my puzzling had been correct, there were some things I had missed; going back to the drawing board, I’d found that I had been correct about one part, but for the wrong reason – it took more notes and thinking to make sense of this before I could re-execute a modified version of my puzzling plan and find I had successfully navigated through this next level of the puzzle. Some of my initial deductive leaps had paid off, but needed to be further corroborated by straight puzzling to break through this section.
The next section wasn’t too difficult for me, mostly as it is a puzzle type with which I have a decent amount of experience and knew how to tackle. Having passed through, I momentarily thought that I had completed the puzzle, having discovered….. something cool. However, after puzzling in circles for a time, I realized that the box is hiding even more interesting puzzle trickery! I spent quite a bit of time here, going around and around, wondering if I had missed anything and what it could have been, before semi-stumbling into a laugh out loud aha that had me figuring out yet another puzzling secret, which would lead me to yet another puzzling secret or two before I would finally have solved the box in its entirety. After several great puzzling moments, this finale was surprising and ensured that a really cool and original puzzle was something absolutely memorable and unique.
While the first rule of TTMT may well be to not talk about TTMT, I must say that it wonderfully manages to bring together so many different types of puzzles into one, cohesive whole: the various puzzles and challenges are distinct but interconnected and it almost feels like being taken on a tour of the various types of challenges mechanical puzzling can offer, wrapped up in a pretty box of maple and mahogany. The box connects well with some of Jack’s past work, which links past and present in a cool way; as someone who is still in his first decade of legit puzzling, this was a really nice feeling: he created the ability for us to connect to some puzzling history in a direct and tangible way that provides the box with a greater context, which I appreciated and enjoyed. Now if I could only get my hands on a Jack in the Box…….. 😉
Puzzle Ramblings 
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