- This is a puzzle box.
How would you solve it? Let me show you.
[dynamic music] [box clicking]
- [Narrator] Meet Kagen Sound,
a multi-award winning woodworker and artist
who's mastered the craft of designing
and fabricating intricate wooden puzzle boxes.
- There's one I made that was a 5,000-move box,
but it took so many moves it would just wear itself out
before you could really open it successfully.
You could open it a few times,
but the wooden parts would just wear out.
- [Narrator] With no nails,
just carefully interlaced wood and some glue,
Kagen can build eye-catching riddles
that are a true challenge to solve.
- This is the hedgehog.
It is currently locked, this is how you unlock it.
Each piece has essentially a notch and a slider underneath.
They block each other until they're moved out of the way.
So every time I move a piece,
it's unlocking the next piece to move,
which unlocks the next piece.
My favorite feature of this
is actually not all the sliding moves,
but the way that the lid comes off by twisting.
I find that really surprising and really satisfying.
It has this sort of tension to it that's really beautiful.
This box is called the Hex Flex
and this is how you unlock it.
This is a box that I really pushed the boundaries
on the material in an absolutely insane direction.
The box was in
the International Puzzle Party design competition.
It took both top awards,
therefore making it the Puzzle of the Year, 2023.
So not only is an amazing puzzle, it's an amazing box.
- [Narrator] And each of these puzzles
begins its life in Kagen's home woodshop.
- This is my woodworking space.
I've been here for six years.
Overall, I've been a woodworker for 20 years.
I have a math degree,
but as far as woodworking is concerned,
I'm entirely self-taught in that.
All the tools over in this area are for processing the wood
and breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits.
[saws grinding]
Over here, I'm usually testing out finishes.
A lot of times if I can determine a finish
for a particular kind of wood,
it will unlock a project in itself.
Moving over here, we have
one of the current projects underway.
It's called the Bookmark Box.
And in order to solve it, you actually have to find
just the right spot to push to pop out a bookmark.
And then it's used actually to unlock the box itself.
So as the work flows over in this direction here,
these are tools for cutting little miniature tracks
and miniature notches into the working parts.
As the box comes together,
I start to grab more and more hand tools
to do the fine tuning of the piece.
And then the main stage
where everything's taking place in a project
really is my workbench here.
As this piece comes together,
it'll look something like this,
which has a final finish on it
and functions as a puzzle box.
This box is called the Plus Box.
I named it after the pattern of pluses on the top
that I created out of two different colors of wood.
The clicking mechanism is created entirely by wooden parts.
[dynamic music] [box clicking]
It has an actual wooden spring
that clicks into little notches.
I have an example of the wooden spring
and a mechanism that rotates
but it accomplishes the same thing.
The spring is this little chunk of wood in here
with little notches cut in it,
and it will click when it hits this notch area here.
And really all it is is just a piece of wood
with a few lines cut into it from opposing directions
and it has a springy quality to it.
So that's the same spring
that's inside of this box in multiple places.
- [Narrator] Kagen's newest creation, the Cafe Wall Box,
is in process in his workshop, ready to be actualized.
- I have the four basic walls
of what will become my puzzle box.
I've now put in a very thick big saw blade
that's gonna cut notches into the wood,
and the notches are gonna create the joinery
that holds together those two rectangles
and creates the corner edge of these boxes.
This cut will need to be at an angle
so that I can make what's called a dovetail track.
It's a shape of a trapezoid and that has the function
of housing a slider that's also a trapezoid.
It won't be able to pop out,
it's a sliding part and it will stay attached to the box,
but have the ability to go back and forth.
So that was just one side of each of the trapezoid notches,
I'm gonna cut the other side of that same notch now.
Now what I'm gonna do
is take these little pieces of wood with my notches
and use this tool called the router
to remove all the material
in between these two little notches I made.
[saw whining]
After machining notches into these pieces of wood,
I now have a dovetail track.
After machining it, I'll have to come around with a chisel
to trim leftover fuzzy material
or parts that the machine couldn't get to
and make it a clean, precise dovetail track.
- [Narrator] This kind of detailed woodworking
is a true passion for Kagen, but his love of puzzles
began long before he was building with wood.
- I'd always loved puzzles,
but when I first saw a puzzle box,
it was a whole nother level of interest.
The first ones I ever made, I was in middle school
and I didn't even have wood, I had cardboard.
It was just a box that had a move to open,
but you couldn't see it.
It was a very secretive sliding-lid box.
So I carried that thought with me all the way to college
and then just was dying to create this out of wood.
I'm almost more proud of myself
for just getting myself into a place to build that box.
It represents a lot to me, a lot more than just building it,
was the path of finding the tools and the passion
of wanting that design to be a real thing.
To solve the pinwheel box,
this is working entirely on a principle in puzzles
called coordinate motion.
You have more than one moving part,
and they all move into each other in such a way
that they also move out of the way of each other.
So each of these panels that's rectangular
has a diagonal movement that goes towards the other.
So this panel right here
wants to move diagonally towards this,
and then this one moves diagonally towards that.
And when they all move diagonally at the same time,
it allows them to shift in a simultaneous dance together.
This is the Rune Cube.
It's locked and this is how you solve it.
[understated jazz music]
Already getting stuck. There we go, that's what I missed.
I'm getting stumped. So I have that correct.
There are some puzzles I have
that would take me a while to unlock
and this would qualify as one of those.
There we go.
So as I'm designing these puzzle boxes,
a lot of it is just contemplative.
I'm just sitting, thinking about how these things
move in my head.
I really don't get too carried away drawing it in detail,
I'll mostly just do very rough sketches,
sometimes a sequence of moves,
but I keep it very loose in order to give myself flexibility
because the designs really change a lot.
Something like the cafe wall pattern shifting illusion
actually came out of woodworking,
where I was creating a a piece of inlay
and I was moving the little parts around
to make this inlay block and then I noticed,
oh, they can turn into other patterns.
But what's amazing is it's made up of five strips of wood
and the strips are really actually quite simple
in comparison to what the pattern is.
So with the box lid, there's two of these sliders
that change patterns.
And what I like to do with a lot of my puzzles
is to have someone who's opening the box
be required to actually creating different patterns
along the way of solving it.
Making patterns starts from two different colors of wood
and these woods, I take and I glue them
and I stack them all together.
And after they're glued up, I take this block
and I then machine out angled rectangular blocks.
These blocks are then arranged into striped pattern
and these will then get glued together.
After the pattern's created, I take a wet sponge,
I can wet the top of that wood a little bit,
just has the effect of making the wood
more pliable for a plane.
[plane scraping]
And then iron it to flatten it out.
And I now have a veneer and I'll just glue this down
onto a strip of cherry.
So this turns from here into here.
This side has the top
and there's two notches cut on each side here,
and the top will then slide in just like this.
In order to force someone
to actually solve these different patterns,
it requires that each of these sliders
is attached to a little peg
and that the peg then has to go and navigate through a maze.
So I've made this lid that goes underneath it
and it will register each of the sliders and make it
so you have to progress through the patterns to unlock it.
So that sits in here.
I've prepared a box and finished it.
For this particular box, I opted to start
with a different pattern and have it transform
into the pattern you saw before.
As like the other one that's side slides down,
you would then slide the pattern
and that would be the opening of that box.
The mace plate itself, just push on it to pop it up,
and I can see the inside of the box.
- [Narrator] As hard to solve
as some of Kagen's puzzles are,
he encouraged me to try and figure out one for myself.
Okay, this moves.
- [Kagen] You're doing the right thing
by looking for what needs to move.
That's what it's all about.
- [Narrator] Oh no, I'm stuck, backwards.
Oh, this is so fun.
- Yeah, this is essentially a maze,
but made out of rectangles.
So you are currently in the maze.
- [Narrator] Oh, I just went backwards.
I think I did that one already.
- Getting lost in a maze is a big part
of solving a puzzle box and remembering where you were,
recognizing new passages.
Big part of the fun.
- [Narrator] Uh oh, I got stuck again.
- So this is a little psychological.
It might have tricked you into thinking
you didn't make any progress, but I would encourage you
to keep going forward on those tiles.
You've actually accomplished a lot,
you've changed the state of those tiles.
They're now rearranged.
So if things are rearranged,
that could mean something different can happen.
- Oh, so maybe I can like push it? Oh.
- So that wasn't allowed to happen before.
That's a new thing.
- Oh, that's so cool!
- Yeah, when you're playing with a puzzle box,
you just always are paying attention to how things change.
And it might be very subtle and it might make you think
you aren't making any progress, but you really are.
And as long as you keep exploring,
you'll eventually get it open.
- That's really cool.
I'm hooked and I wanna do like six more.
It's really fun.
- So this box is called the Snake Box.
I took the block box concept a little bit further
and used rectangles
that I made out of two different colors of wood.
Right now it's tessellation that I really like
that I refer to as snakes.
And what it does is by shifting the blocks around on it,
it transforms into an entirely new pattern
that's very identifiable.
If this pattern is created,
then you've solved the box and you can open it up.
- [Narrator] No matter how many boxes
Kagen builds or attempts,
his love for puzzles only continues to grow.
- I think people love mechanical puzzles
because there's a playfulness to it.
It's reminding us to be a child
and to interact with something in a tactile way,
but also be thoughtful and curious about the object.
To me, the best puzzles are the ones
that you can play with for an hour
and then you can hand it over to your five-year-old,
and they can look at it and solve it in five minutes.
I think children are just inherently good puzzle solvers
and they're also inherently good at creative projects.
They're inherently good at just anything
that everyone wants to be.
And I think that's really what gets in people's way
when they're trying to solve a puzzle.
They almost are forgetting that they're still a child.
There's a child inside of them that's still there.
[contemplative music]