The last hand-made puzzles in the world
Every Trigon began on paper, worked out by hand by one man. He is gone, and there will be no more. This is how it happened.
A British board game
Trigon began as a board game, invented by Alan Frazer Dackers — Dax to everyone who knew him, and The Boffin to everyone else — together with Lester Jordan, who went by Sgt Bilko. Between them they worked out a puzzle built on triangular dominoes, where each triangle carries a number on every side and a centre number that adds them up.
The idea is simple to explain and very hard to exhaust. Give a solver only the centre numbers and there is exactly one route to the answer — no guessing, no luck, no trial and error. Dax's rule was absolute:
“Never put in a number because it will fit. Only put in a number because nothing else will fit.” Dax
Scribbled on paper
This is the part that cannot be repeated. Dax worked out every original puzzle by hand, on sheets of paper, with a pencil. Not one was ever invented by a computer. He also decided the difficulty of each one himself, and when he marked something Extreme he meant it.
Peter Rutter was brought in to turn that output into books. He digitised the scribbled sheets into properly typeset pages, assembled them into books with covers and solving instructions, and put them out for people to download, print, and solve with a pencil and a rubber — plenty of rubber, because everybody makes mistakes.
That happened once a month, every month, for thirty months. Each book assembled by hand, one page at a time.
Then it stopped
Dax and Lester have both died. No new Trigon will ever be created, because the only person who could make one is no longer here to make it.
What survives is his originals — every puzzle he ever worked out. That is the complete and final collection, and it will never grow by a single sheet.
months, a book a month
men who made them
books rebuilt from his work
invented by computer
Why they're back
The assets survived — the spreadsheets, the original sheets, the number sets. Peter owns them, and has spent the last stretch of time putting every puzzle into one catalogue, checking it, and rebuilding the books to a modern design.
Sixty books, arranged so no two puzzles in the same book share a solution route. Some pages are Dax's originals exactly as he drew them. Others are those same puzzles turned or mirrored, so the route through is different while the logic stays his. Nothing was invented by a machine, and nothing has been added that did not start on his paper.
There is also, now, a version you can play in a browser — which Dax would probably have found funny, and then immediately tried to beat.
Start with a free one
The best way to understand any of this is to solve one.
Get a free book Play online