The Cubedex of Brass and Wood

The Cubedex of Brass and Wood is a puzzle game concerning mysterious electromechanical devices linked by the Cubedex itself. Like puzzle hunts and escape rooms, sometimes the goal is obvious but the solution is challenging; and sometimes figuring out the goal is itself part of the puzzle.

More puzzles: additional variations of the Balance, Cart, and Machine puzzles are included (click the star in the upper left!) to further stretch your brain.

The Devices

The Balance has nine pans and eight weights:

The Cart is a Bakelite robot programmed with plug-in tubes:

The Machine has seven tubes and seven buttons:

The Maze is a light puzzle. I could write another mysterious description, but you know what a light puzzle is. There's always a light puzzle in these things. It's like catnip for puzzle designers.

The Clock doesn't seem to tell time:

The Cubedex has six faces, but none are quite where you expect them to be, and one holds a secret locked away:

The Series

Jim McCann / TCHOW llc developed the Cube* puzzle games to continue his tradition of creating midwinter puzzle hunts for his brother. The Steam releases are the first time these tiny and frustrating puzzling worlds have been available to a large audience, and contain significant enhancements relative to their original (single-member-audience) releases.

The Cubedex of Brass and Wood is the first game in the main series of Cube* puzzle games. It was created as a midwinter gift in 2015 and updated and polished for Steam in 2020.

The Standard Notes

Nothing in these store pages, the game web page, the game documentation, or other materials outside the game is a puzzle.

The Cubedex of Brass and Wood is intended to be solved without decompilation, resource snooping, or modification of game files. Indeed, these are all considered cheating. (And, really, who are you cheating but yourself? Once you know the answer, you can never discover it fairly.)

You will, however, benefit greatly from scrap paper, a good reference for standard encoding schemes, and -- potentially, though it is not required -- the ability to write some small computer programs to search for solutions to combinatorial problems.