Craig Thibodeau, Roentgen Puzzle Desk (WORLD 2024)

Photos:

Craig Thibodeau

Country:

United States

72″ wide by 34″ deep by 60″ high. Materials: Walnut Burl, Walnut, Satinwood, Ebony, and misc marquetry woods. Inspired by one of my favorite desks built by David Roentgen in roughly 1780, this puzzle desk is by far my most complex mechanical piece to date. Designed for a client who’s primary request was for a puzzle that would take months to solve the desk features dozens of mechanical puzzles and a variety of automated moving parts built into the overall framework. The idea for this piece was to create a desk that from the outside looked like a traditional David Roentgen style desk (restyled slightly to suit the puzzles inside) but from the inside once some exploration was done would reveal itself to be much, much more than just a desk. The storyline of the desk, detailed in the 200 page logbook written and illustrated as part of its creation tells the story of a pirate ship captain from the 1780's and his battles with various world governments. The task is to retrace his journey by solving a variety of sequential mechanical and logic puzzles through use of the provided clues, the hand drawn treasure map and a variety of period correct equipment to find the location of a massive buried treasure. Along the way you'll find and disassemble an old naval dirk and flintlock pistol to make use of their parts and need to learn how to use a compass and astrolabe to determine when and where his ship stopped. A heavily modified sextant can be installed into the desk and once the various clues it reveals are deciphered additional locations along the journey are found. The two marquetry images created for the desk each reveal a series of additional clues used to solve puzzles, and hide a few other surprises as well. Finding the final treasure reveals there is another object somewhere waiting to solved and clues to an even larger treasure.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.