The story of Trigon
The last hand-made puzzles in the world. Trigon has had three lives: it began as a game you could hold in your hands, became a puzzle in a national newspaper, and very nearly disappeared altogether. This is how it survived.
It started as a game — in colour
Long before it was a puzzle on a page, Trigon was a board game, built around triangular pieces and played in colour. It was invented by Alan Frazer Dackers — “Dax”, also known as “The Boffin” — and Lester Jordan, “Sgt Bilko”, together with a handful of others who believed in it enough to raise the money and bring it to market. It sold around the world, and was stocked by the famous London toy shop Hamleys.
Then it became a puzzle
From the colour game came the numbers puzzle that solvers know today: triangular pieces, a number on every side, a centre number that adds them up, and exactly one route through — found by logic alone, with no guessing. Those number puzzles ran in The Daily Telegraph, and in 1994 Pan gathered a collection of them into The Daily Telegraph Book of Trigons. Dax's rule never changed:
“Never put in a number because it will fit. Only put in a number because nothing else will fit.”
Bringing them to the page
Lester brought me — Peter Rutter — on board to see whether the numbers version could be digitised and published properly. It was not simple. Dax worked entirely by hand, pen and pencil on sheets of paper; he was never a man for computers. Every puzzle had to be rebuilt as numbers set inside their shapes so it could be printed — and the real test was accuracy, because a single typo makes a whole puzzle unsolvable. After a great deal of careful work we could produce faithful, accurate books. We issued them month by month, sold as print-on-demand and from our own website; Lester looked after the customers and their queries and dreamed up the promotions people still remember — the Christmas competitions and the Valentine's Day puzzles.
Then it stopped
In time Dax laid down his pencil for the last time, and the platforms of the day changed their rules. Both Dax and Lester have since died; no new Trigon will ever be created, because the only men who could make one are gone. Back in 2006 it never once crossed my mind that a new generation of solvers might come looking for these twenty years on. For a long while, it all simply stopped.
The rescue
When I finally returned to it, what remained was fragile. Of all the books we had made, only twenty-four survived — as flat PDF files, with no easy way back to the numbers underneath — together with some residual number sets I had kept on old hard drives. Bringing them home has been a long, patient job: prising the original numbers out of those files, rebuilding them properly, designing every page anew, and reassembling and expanding the collection into a new series.
This isn't my first attempt to put Trigon on a screen. Years ago I built a version for the PDAs of the day — it ran on Flash, and it worked, until smartphones swept the PDAs away and Flash quietly died. The idea was right; the world just hadn't caught up. It has now.
Twenty years on, I finally have the time — and, for the first time, the technology. I have always been an early adopter, and here the newest tools of all, artificial intelligence among them, let me do something we could only have dreamed of in Dax's pencil-and-paper days: rebuild his puzzles faithfully, carry them onto a screen, and put a Trigon in your pocket — tap and play on a phone, with a fresh one free every day. Every puzzle traces back to Dax's own hand-made work — never a machine. The technology does not replace him — it carries his life's work to a new generation and a new kind of screen. I think he and Lester would have been delighted; it feels like the right way to honour them.
In memory of Dax and Lester
None of this would exist without Alan Frazer Dackers and Lester Jordan — the boffin who made every puzzle by hand and never let a number sit where logic did not demand it, and the man who kept the whole thing alive, looked after every customer, and never ran out of ideas. They are both gone now, and the puzzles they leave behind are finite and irreplaceable. This is their work, and it is dedicated to them.
Start with a free one
The best way to understand any of it is to solve one.