The Destroyer

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The Destroyer is designed and produced by PuzzleMaster. There's a wide variety of these puzzles, all made by PuzzleMaster and you can find them here.

Wire disentanglement puzzles date back from a couple of centuries ago, and back then were recognized as some kind of magic tricks, because of the steps required to separate them. This type of mechanical puzzles are also among the most difficult ones to solve, mostly because of their design, which is always different for each one. This implicates that whichever puzzle you solve, you won't gain much experience for solving a completely different one. Over these couple of centuries, thousands of different designs have been made, which fall into several categories. You can see a comprehensive guide on these puzzles at Robb's Puzzle Page.

The goal of The Destroyer is somewhat easy to comprehend, compared to other designs. There's a red string with a green bead attached and you need to remove them from the puzzle. The puzzle is rated by PuzzleMaster at 9 out of 10, which is pretty difficult, but I found it much easier than I was expecting it to be (around 10 minutes to solve)... You just have to look at it with a different approach, much like any other wire puzzle, for that matter. At first glance, when you try to work out how to remove the string, it looks like the only possible way is to pass it around the big ring. It's an impossible task though, because the red string is smaller than the diameter of the ring. The correct method to get the string out, is actually through the bottom part of the 4-shaped frame, but since you have that black string with the ring blocking your way, you need to shift it to another part of the frame, leaving open space to finally remove the red string. You'll need to pass the ring through the frame in order to make the black string able to move freely around the wire. To get the red string back on its original position, just repeat the same steps backwards.

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Closing Comments:

I was pleasantly surprised by the clever design of The Destroyer. I was able to solve it in a fairly amount of time, probably in a lucky move, but I bet there'll be others that will struggle to see the solution so easily, because after all, this is a level 9 puzzle. While Wire Puzzles aren't among my favorite type of mechanical puzzles, they do provide a serious level of challenge and creative thinking. I recommend it for anyone that likes to think outside of the box.

The Destroyer is available at PuzzleMaster, along with many other great wire puzzles.

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