Mayan Box
Benno de Grote, 9.75″ x 7.5″ x 3.75″, 42 steps
Originally designed as part of an ultimately cancelled tie-in to the movie Tomb Raider, Mayan Box calls to the booby-trap-loving, One-Eyed-Willy-following, rolling-boulder-evading, puzzle-spelunking spirit responsible for a significant amount of this particular puzzler’s passion for puzzles.
It took some time but eventually a very large box of precisely laser cut wood stained a lovely reddish color and covered with Mayan engravings arrived at my door. Layered panels and little protrusions laced proportionately along plenty of its lines and edges teased me with indications of what might eventually do something, but initially seem mostly to do nothing.
With so many possible points of entry, I struggled to get started, more than a little distracted by how cool the box looks. I knew that the box had 42 steps to solve and I had wondered whether this would include a lot of blind mechanisms; with so many knobs and panels and such, it is no surprise that very little of the puzzle is blind – picking it up, you can hear something that hints at some semi-blind steps long the way but the vast majority of the puzzle is figuring out what to do when and where and what then…… planning and memory must follow careful inspection and close observation if you hope to dig your way into the heart of this puzzle box.
As much as I hate letting go of my puzzle boxes, I have a need to make some space (and puzzle money) and Mayan was among those that lost the coin toss; it is especially hard to let go of a puzzle that I had lusted after for so long, and writing this is not helping me grow comfortable with this commitment – with some amount of self-aware forethought, I had waited until after it was listed to write about it (knowing that doing so would otherwise be all to likely to make me change my mind, coin toss be darned!).
Solving this box took me many months of starting and stopping: one wall in particular held me up, but the other dozens of steps had me getting lost more than once as I fought my way through the overgrown jungle that kept these ancient secrets locked up tight. Benno has a few extra surprises hidden within, including multiple compartments to discover and something that had me smiling, separate from the many ahas awaiting me along the way. There is a logic to be discovered, and most everything you need to know can be seen from the start, but the sheer complexity and breadth of the design had me going backwards or in circles, or sometimes simply staring at a steep wall, at least as often as it had me making actual progress.
Eventually, I did manage to fully excavate the path to the solution, emerging through the canopy of the puzzle jungle to enjoy the expansive view that awaits the patient, dedicated puzzler. Happy dances and self-congratulations done, resetting the box was no small feat (and I will admit to looking up bits of the solution once or thrice to confirm I wasn’t lost (or rather to confirm that I was, in fact, lost, and to help get me back on track).
Although Mayan Box is not available, Benno sells many other excellent boxes on his site, Bennoboxes.com. I have also solved his Chess Box and highly recommend it (Boxes & Booze has reviewed Mayan along with a couple of Benno’s currently available designs). Fortunately, Chess Box did not lose the coin toss and will remain with me for the foreseeable future.
Puzzle Ramblings 
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