Mechanical Puzzles Blog

Mechanical Puzzle Boxes and their SECRET
Boxes are beautiful. Simple, streamlined, versatile compartments full of mystery and history that have lasting, universal appeal. There is somethin...

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Subscription Puzzle Boxes but Were Afraid to Ask!
Faced with the power and freedom of extra time at home, I’m always pursuing new ways to keep my brain and body active. Naturally, I seek refuge in ...

Top 10 Most Difficult Wooden Puzzles for Adults
For most people, their first encounter with a mechanical puzzle consists of trial and error, for expert puzzlers, it takes lots of observation and ...

Homeschooling with Puzzles and Games
When you think back to your childhood, even before you began school, you can see that your earliest instances of learning were through puzzles and ...

Maze vs. Labyrinth
Beware the Fine Print Way back in the seventh grade, I made a model of the Cretan labyrinth for a class project. It was well received, even though ...

Crosses and Circles, The Mahabharata, and the Legacy of Ludo
If you play board games, chances are good that you've seen or played at least one game in the “Cross and Circle” family of board games (so called b...

Thinking Outside the Board - Infinity Checkers
The subject of today’s article has suffered a kind of identity crisis; none of the names applied so far have really stuck. It originated in Java, w...

The Odyssey of Sudoku
  In my post about Go, I mentioned how Japanese logic puzzles such as kakuro, nurikabe and hashiwokakero (Bridges) derive many heuristics from a fe...

Fanorona and Corona - Creativity and Isolation
As you might expect from the title, this is going to be yet more thoughts on a topic that we all find literally inescapable these days. As I write ...

We Regret The Error - Thoughts About the Game of Solitaire
Did you know that Haagen-Dazs was invented in the Bronx? It’s true; Danish doesn’t even have an umlaut. It’s an example of foreign branding--the tr...

Cribbage Can Be Murder
Among card games, cribbage is an oddity. It uses a standard deck of playing cards, but the way you include your opponent’s hand and the discarded “...

Complexity From Simplicity - A Brief Look at Go
Here at Kubiya games we love our classics, and there are few games older than the strategy game Go. It's a great game with a following as large as ...