Abraham’s Well sequential design by Brian Young.

A Sequential Discovery Puzzle design by Brian Young at Mr Puzzle. More than two years in the making. You know it will be hard, but not just one puzzle element to solve. There’ll be lots of Aha! moments during the solve of this one.

Released 28th June 2021. 550 made.
Original Price: AU$495.00
Winner: Puzzlers’ Award IPP Design Competition 2022

Update 20th December 2023

We still have a few of these puzzles for sale. Please email us at [email protected] if you are interested. We have retired and our website is closed for sales but we are happy to send you a PayPal or Credit card invoice and arrange for shipping one of the last of these puzzles.

The price of the puzzle is Australian Dollars 450.00 to send outside Australia or AU 495.00 including Australian GST if shipped to an Australian address plus postage costs.

Whilst we will not be selling puzzles anymore the website will continue with just the archive history of Brian Young puzzles and other puzzles made by us here at Mr Puzzle over the past 30 years. We recognise that many puzzlers use it as a research tool when looking for information about puzzles in their collection or offered for auction or sale by others.

Keep on Puzzling.
Brian & Sue Young @ Mr Puzzle.

There are elements in the puzzle Brian would consider as much easier than 10/10. But he’s incorporated completely new ideas in this puzzle too so that always throws a spanner in the works and makes the puzzle harder. Overall, we do think it’s a very difficult puzzle. To work it out with his intended solution we believe its definitely worthy of the 10/10 rating.

The making of Abraham’s Well puzzle has been a huge undertaking for Mr Puzzle.
Brian had a concept for the major step in the puzzle way back in 2018 and began designing the puzzle around that. Perhaps the most difficult part of the design is to know when to stop adding things to the puzzle.

Abraham’s Well has many separate steps to solve with a level of complexity comparable or surpassing previous multi-step sequential discovery puzzles. Physically the puzzle is smaller like the Plugged Well. But it has so many steps it’s more like solving the Opening Bat. Not that the Aha! moments in either of those two puzzles have been repeated here. This is a totally new idea.

The puzzle can be separated into are 23 individual parts. There are another 21 parts that are glued into the body and never actually come out of the puzzle. There’s a tool for every step of this puzzle and a big part of the puzzling is to work out which of these parts are tools, and which are not. The tools are tightly packed and very well hidden.

A major characteristic of this puzzle contributing to the difficulty level is that even if you’re able to take the puzzle apart using a non-intended solution or even just by chance, you cannot reverse engineer the solution just by seeing all the pieces laid out in front of you. This is quite unlike most other puzzles that we know about.

All the parts of the puzzle, both woodworking and metalworking, are made and machined here by Brian and his team at Mr Puzzle. Making the brass parts for this puzzle is a massive undertaking. But it’s not only lathe work. He bought a new Milling Machine too! The table saw, 4 routers and the CNC were used in the making of the wooden body of the puzzle. The importance of jigs cannot be understated and the running sheet with the steps to make each puzzle is very important.

Trivial facts about the puzzle:

start with 600grams solid brass
after machining, there are only 200 grams left
23 individual parts
another 21 parts are glued into the body and never actually come out of the puzzle