WINNER: One of two Jury First Prizes given in the Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition 2012 at IPP in Washington, USA in 2012. But to be able to bring Houdini to puzzlers everywhere we have this time focused purely on the puzzling aspect rather than creating a finely crafted expensive puzzle. We’ve inspected every puzzle here in Australia to ensure what we’re sending out is reasonable.īrian is well-known for bringing very high-quality puzzles to market. There are draw marks in the brass and occasionally there might be a small hairline crack in the acrylic behind the rivet where they’ve been hand-assembled. It’s not intended to be a high-end high-quality limited-availability puzzle.

This is an accurate factory-produced version of that same puzzle.īrian has supervised the manufacture in China from standard brass and acrylic stock and we’ve tried to realistically represent the quality in the photo. That wooden version has been sold out for many years and thus become quite collectible, usually only available at specialist auctions for quite high prices. The original wooden version of Houdini’s Torture Cell was made for 2011 International Puzzle Party which was held in Berlin. The theme of the puzzle celebrates Harry Houdini’s first public performance of The Torture Cell at the Circus Busch in Berlin on 12th September 1912. You can literally sit and think about the solution without even touching the puzzle. The puzzle is to then work out how to use those tools to solve it. Unlike The Opening Bat where the puzzle was completely hidden inside, this puzzle has been presented in such a way that most elements of the puzzle are visible to you. Brian felt the idea was unique and very satisfying to solve so he revisited the idea and made a separate puzzle.

The idea for Houdini’s Torture Cell came from one of the locks in the incredibly complex The Opening Bat puzzle (part of the Sold Out Limited Edition 2010 series). There is a tool to discover for every aspect of the solve. Yes, there are lots of magnets in the puzzle but no “hitting” or “banging” is necessary to solve it. One feature that Brian builds into many of these types of sequential discovery puzzles is to give you something to find almost immediately better to maintain interest in the puzzle. To do that you’ll have to discover the tools and work out how to use them. The object of the puzzle is to free Houdini from The Torture Cell.

Houdini escape puzzle