Worst. Puzzle. Ever.

It breaks my heart to write this post because the puzzle in question was 1) very expensive and 2) given to me by someone very dear to me who doesn't have a lot of disposable income. I hope he never sees this.

At first glance, the Isis puzzle looks very promising. It bills itself as the world's hardest puzzle, though I personally give that title to Scott Fredrickson's jigsaw puzzles. The packaging is beautiful, and the production quality appears to be very high. The puzzle comes in what looks like (but isn't really) a black lacquer wooden box with a metal clasp. Just the box is better made (and probably more expensive) than most puzzles. The box is embossed with "ISIS I" in silver lettering above a hologram sticker with what appears to be a serial number (or maybe it's a clue!)

Opening the box reveals a metal sphere about three inches in diameter and weighing about a pound. It feels dense, hefty, solid. Around the circumference of the sphere are three metal bands engraved with Egyptian hieroglyphics. On the bottom of the sphere is, again engraved, a ten-digit number (which turns out to be -- I'm not giving anything away here -- the actual serial number). On the top of the sphere is a button that goes down about a half a centimeter when you press it but has no other immediately discernible effect. The metal bands with the hieroglyphics turn with a satisfying clicking sound. The thing positively oozes mystery and the promise of an exciting intellectual adventure.

Alas.

The black lacquer box comes packaged inside a cardboard box, which also contains a very thin pamphlet. One might be forgiven for thinking that this pamphlet is the instruction booklet, but no such luck. It is in fact simply an advertisement for other puzzles in the series, and directions on "How to start your adventure." There follows an eight-step (!) process for logging on to the company's web site in order to get the instructions. And the process requires you to reveal your full name, your mailing address, your phone number, your email address, and the serial number of your Isis before you are allowed in.

It is at this point that you might recall that there was a red seal on the cardboard box that you had to break in order to open it. And on that red seal was what is essentially a shrink wrap EULA:

"If you break this seal to accept The ISIS challenge there is no turning back. The ISIS cannot be returned after this seal is broken or its box is opened. Thank you."

So the situation you find yourself in is this: you have just paid well north of three digits for "the world's hardest puzzle", you have broken the seal so that you can no longer get your money back, and only then do you learn for the first time that you have to turn over your personal information to the company in order to find out what you're supposed to do with the damn thing. You are at this point, though I'm sure most people won't realize it, the victim of a bait-and-switch scam. That personal information you're being asked to provide is valuable, and for the company to withhold an essential part of the product you just bought until you hand it over is shameful at best. In my opinion, the fact that you don't find this out until you break the seal and render the product unreturnable makes it extortion. (If anyone from Sonic Warp is reading this, in my emails to you I used the term "blackmail". That was a mistake. Extortion is the correct term. I regret the error.)

But let's not quibble over terminology. Let's suppose that you do not share my obsession with keeping personal information out of the hands of unknown parties, and that you consider handing over your information in exchange for the instruction booklet to be a fair trade. What happens then? Well, I went ahead and registered (with a false identity). I got my user name and password, but when I tried to log in it didn't work! Instead I got the singularly useless error message, "Illegal input characters. Please remove and resubmit."

Illegal input characters? Say what? I just cut-and-pasted my user ID and password (both of which consist of nothing but letters and numbers) from the email you sent me. Exactly which "illegal characters" do you want me to remove?

At this point I was fed up, so I punted and got the Isis instruction manual from the web. The manual is pretty uninformative, but it does contain ten clues. The clues are encrypted. (You can buy the decryption keys from the company's web site. Was I surprised? No, I was not.)

Warning: spoilers follow. If you want the unalloyed thrill of solving the Isis without cheating, stop reading here.

Fortunately, the clues are encrypted using simple substitution ciphers. It took me just a few minutes to crack them using this handy dandy tool. (The decrypted clues have also been published on the web if you care to look.) I also found that the solution is out there too. The clues turned out to be pretty useless, and by this time I was getting pretty fed up, so I took a peek.

I need to digress here and say a few words about what makes a good puzzle. Puzzle composition is part art and part science. A good puzzle has to be hard enough to be challenging but not so hard as to be effectively impossible. But there's more to a puzzle than mere challenge. Lots of things are challenging. Solving partial differential equations, for example, is quite challenging, but you'd have to be a pretty hard core geek to consider PDEs to be good recreational puzzles. What distinguishes a good puzzle from a merely difficult challenge? There are four things:

1. The objective has to be clear and easy to understand without special training.

2. The rules under which the objective is to be achieved have to be clear and understandable without special training.

3. The challenge presented by a puzzle must be primarily intellectual in nature, not physical. Juggling, for example, is challenging, has a clear objective, and operates under clear rules. But it's not a puzzle.

And finally:

4. The challenge must arise as a direct result of the structure of the puzzle and not from some obscured secret.

To illustrate this last point, imagine a modern re-invention of the classic Rubik's Cube puzzle where the faces are not just colored stickers but little color LED screens. Every time you make a move, the colors of all the faces on the entire cube change. Moreover, the moves are not reversible: if you start with a virgin cube, make a move and then undo it, the result is a scrambled cube.

Just convincing yourself that this variation is solvable at all would be no easy feat, let alone actually solving it. Now imagine that you've spent a fair amount of time twiddling this new cube trying to discern some pattern in the color changes without success. In frustration, you decide to punt and look at the solution. Imagine how you would feel if the solution turned out to be:

Take the cube and whack it against a hard surface. Twirl it (the whole cube, not one of the faces) clockwise in the air a few times. Turn the whole cube upside down. Then recite Lewis Carrol's "Jabberwocky" backwards seven times (speak clearly so that the cube's internal microphone can pick up the sound of your voice). Congratulations! You have solved the Rondam Cube!

Your reaction might be something along the lines of, "'da f*ck?" And rightfully so. And yet, except for the bit about reciting Jabberwocky backwards, that is in fact the solution to the Isis sphere!!!, or at least the first few steps. No, I am not joking. Whack. Whirl. Tip. That is actually the answer. This is because the actual locking mechanism (oh, I forgot to mention that the objective is to open the sphere) is completely internal and hidden and involves moving ball bearings around on tracks and dislodging them from magnets. Those rings with the hieroglyphics on them? Completely inoperative. Just decoration. Red herrings. Very expensive, carefully machined red herrings that ride on high-tolerance bearings. But red herrings nonetheless.

If that had been all there was to it, I might have just written the whole thing off as nothing more than a white elephant. Unfortunately it was not to be. As they say in the trade: but wait! There's more!

When I tried to open my Isis according to the procedure I found on the web, it didn't work. I tried all manner of whacking and whirling and even recited Jabberwocky just for good measure (amazing how much that poem sounds like cursing when you say it backwards). No luck. My Isis remained stubbornly closed. I wasn't even able to get to the so-called "intermediate stage" where you get a little bit of tactile feedback that you're on the right track. Since I had seen a video of the Isis being opened I knew a bit about the internal mechanism, and all indications were that my Isis was somehow defective.

So I wrote an email to the company asking them to exchange it. To their credit, they responded very quickly (on a weekend even!), and said that yes, they would repair or replace it. But there was a catch: if it turned out that the Isis was not defective, I would have to pay for their time, and for shipping and handling. Which sounds fair enough, until you consider that they will be the final arbiters of whether the Isis was broken or not. And given that they had already demonstrated that they had no compunctions about extorting personal information from their customers, I didn't see any reason to believe that they would have compunctions about telling me that my Isis was in fine working order (and that I therefore had to pay to get it back) regardless of its actual condition. So as I write this we are at an impasse, and my Isis appears destined to remain closed forever.

In my email I also expressed my displeasure over having the instruction manual withheld in order to extort personal information. I asked them to stop doing that. They refused, saying that:

All registered information that we hold is only used if you tick the relevant box, otherwise it is only used to update you as a puzzle owner on new product updates and or to provide support and access to the isis adventure. We never disclose your information to 3rd parties and if you ask us not to send you updates on the puzzle you already own we delete your information from our system. Again we have only ever been asked to do this a handful of times. Please let me know if you wish to have your information deleted from our system. If you ask for this to be done, please ensure you have accurate details of return address for the product your sending to us as we will not have a record on our database for you. The reason we ask you to download the instruction book, is so that you have the most updated instructions. Hard copies can often go out of date.

To this I ask... how can an instruction manual for a mechanical puzzle go out of date? (And who said anything about hard copies?)

As long as we're asking rhetorical questions, why do they require me to provide my mailing address and my phone number and my name? Why is my email address not enough to keep me up to date? Why do they feel the need to be so paternalistic? Do they not think that I am capable of going to their web site myself to check for updates if I want the latest scoop?

As an aside, it is worth noting that when you don't "tick the relevant box" you get a Javascript alert complaining that you haven't checked the box, and offering you a free clue if you do. So even if they respect the user's wishes in this regard, the choice is coerced.

But I digress. There is a much more interesting question to be asked: why would they risk the ire of people like me who value their privacy (and write blogs) when they surely must know that such people are among their target demographic?

Why indeed.

One possibility is that they are simply stupid. They have already demonstrated that they are very bad puzzle designers, so maybe they are just bad marketeers too. Maybe they really believe their own rhetoric. Maybe they really believe that they provide a better customer experience and more value for the money (and it's a lot of money by puzzle standards) if they make absolutely sure that they know each and every customer by name and have a complete dossier on them. That possibility cannot be ruled out.

But there is another, more sinister possibility, that also cannot be ruled out: perhaps they are not in the business of selling puzzles.

Consider this database they are building up. For every customer, they know the person's name, address, phone number, and email address. And they know something much more important: every one of these people was affluent enough (or knew someone affluent enough) to spend a three-digit sum on a puzzle in the middle of the worst economic downturn in living memory. And because you can't register unless you've bought a puzzle and obtained an engraved serial number, their list will be unpolluted by pretenders and wannabes. Because of the way they have set this up, every name on that list will be a certifiable rich person.

That is one mighty valuable list. It is a telemarketer's wet dream. It would be stupid of them not to sell it. And yes, as I've already conceded, it's quite possible they are stupid. But if they aren't stupid then they're duplicitous, if not outright evil. I don't see any other possibilities.

Interestingly, there's actually an experiment one can do to try to determine which of the two possibilities is actually the case. If their actual product is not puzzles but high-quality lists of certifiably affluent people to which to which one might want to market other high-priced goods, one might expect them to take certain precautions against their true intentions being discovered. In particular, they might want to guard against someone like me who, having their suspicions raised about their intentions, might want to do something sneaky like, say, inject a false name into their list. For example, I might try to register my puzzle not under my real name but under an assumed name chosen just for this purpose, say "John H. Doe". If John H. Doe starts to get junk mail then, assuming I haven't used that name anywhere else, that would be proof that the name came from their list. And that might cause them problems down the road.

What precautions might they take against someone doing something like this? Well, one thing they might do is to allow a given serial number to be registered only once. This makes it less likely that someone will infect their database with a false name because a person would have to realize before they took their one shot at registration that something unsavory might be afoot and that they should take precautions.

On the other hand, if their intentions were honorable they would have no reason to prevent the same serial number from being registered more than once. People might want to sell their puzzles to someone else. Surely the company's professed concern about their customers having up-to-date manuals should extend to people who acquire their puzzles secondhand?

Of course I did this experiment. And unsurprisingly, it would not let me register twice, saying "That serial number is already registered under a different email address." If there's a benign explanation for that, I can't think what it could be.

For all these reasons I reluctantly award the Sonicwarp Isis Adventure the title of Worst Puzzle Ever. I take no joy in this. I just think potential buyers have a right to know what they might be getting into.