It MUST Be a Box if...

1. It has bread in it and...
2. I cannot solve it without help!

Juno's Slammed Car

Junichi Yananose is an evil genius! He produces wonderful beautiful prize-winning puzzles and absolutely adores winding me up! There had been a rumour of a sequential discovery puzzle from Juno for quite a while and I was given advance warning at least 2 months ahead by Yukari so that I could save up and the moment the notification email went out from Juno and Yukari's Pluredro store , I immediately shot to the website and in the middle of anaesthetising for a rather long boring operation, I surveilled, I thought, I hesitated at the not inconsiderable price and I came to the conclusion:

Who am I kidding? Of course you need this in your collection! Juno has never ever sold a dud yet!

Duly ordered before the op was over, I waited a week for it to arrive and then after paying Her Majesty's hostage ransom, I finally had this wonderful wooden sculpture in my hands.

The detail is fabulous!
Obviously a fair bit of CNC work here.

I set to straight away with the cat on my lap and immediately made a nice discovery...which led to another discovery and another and another. This was great! Both me and the furry boy on my lap were fascinated at all the pieces. So much so that I had to tuck them under my thigh to stop him running off with them. Like most cars, there is a bonnet to open (that's a hood to you Yanks) and a boot to open eventually as well (that would be trunk!) There are also things to be done that you really shouldn't do to a real car (unless you like expensive bills from the garage) then, of course, when you open the inside of the car there are all sorts of interesting things inside...

They fell out 'guv'! Honest! I didn't break your car!

So, in an evening, I had first a detached wing mirror, a bonnet, a number (license) plate, a spanner (wrench), another wing mirror and a battery... This car is going nowhere fast! Here I got stuck for the rest of the evening.

The following evening, I had one of those "Danlock moments". This is the decision where you want to do something but you really are not sure whether doing it is a good idea, or whether it might get you into real trouble! It is always embarrassing emailing a puzzle craftsman to tell him that you have lost something inside his puzzle and can you send it back for him to extract it? After a few minutes of contemplation, thinking© and failing to find an alternative, I did the necessary move and it did nothing but it wasn't stuck inside thank goodness! What if I... BINGO!

I was into the next stage and I had a few more pieces and some very interesting places to use several of those pieces. Here I got stuck...for weeks and weeks and weeks! On FaceBook I saw with dismay that many of my puzzle friends were finishing their puzzles and were delighted with what they found. I kept at it and found something interesting but it didn't help me.

This puzzle has lots of holes and small parts and even my blind puzzling friend, Ed, solved his! Aaaargh! Why could I not do it? I had thought it was a sequential discovery puzzle and I am supposed to be just better than rubbish at those. Apparently, I was wrong...the other puzzlers were all revealing a cavity and inside a bloody loaf of bread (not one covered in blood!) which showed exactly why I couldn't solve it! I CAN'T solve boxes for the life of me! I got a hint from another FB friend, Jay which showed me another feature of the new area but helped not one bit in progressing. Then Ed suggested I start to multitask (those of you who have solved it will know what this means) and I tried that for a while. Now, I am a proper bloke! Not covered in tattoos, I have a rubbish brain that cannot do more than one thing at a time - I struggle to walk and breathe at the same time so this final phase of solving was going to be tough.

I tried for another week and was laughed at by several guys for failing! I'm used to that as it happens to me all the time at the MPP. I was asked to think why something that might be unnecessary might be present and I could not come up with an answer that helped...at first. But the more I looked at it, the more something occurred to me and I tried something new...

AHA!

The gleeful shout earned me an evil glare from "she who was getting pissed off at me whining about being rubbish" and "she who had started asking me why I buy stuff I cannot do". Suddenly I had the full realisation that:

1. It's a box (the loaf of bread is proof)
2. I am completely rubbish.
3. The puzzle is 100% brilliant!

Juno, you ARE an evil genius! The torture was both horrific and wonderful at the same time. I am not into S&M in any way but I loved the torture here!

We have a cavity and a rather stale loaf of bread!

I can see why Juno won the Jury Grand Prize for the Slammed car at the IPP. It is amazing! I am slightly horrified that a whole bunch of puzzlers were able to solve it at the IPP in just a few hours but they are all much better puzzlers than me.

At last, I can move onto some new puzzles that might have arrived recently - hopefully, Mrs S will allow me to live long enough to try.

I cannot wait for more puzzles (of all types) from Juno! This is one of the reasons that I keep buying, playing and writing! I love it! This is not available any longer. All 120 copies sold out quite fast so you will need to wait for one to come up in an auction - it is well worth buying when it does.