Wil Strijbos Metal Puzzles Ranked: First Box vs Hexagon vs Hidden Masterpiece

Let me tell you the thing most write-ups bury: Strijbos didn't just design clever boxes, he changed the rules of engagement. Traditional puzzle boxes leaned on magnets, hidden hinges, or the dreaded "tap it on the table and pray" move. Wil rejected all of it. His sequential-discovery method hands you a sealed object and asks you to uncover the tools — a rod, a ball bearing, a brass key, a disc — and then discover what each unlocks. The genius is that every step teaches the next. There's no external clue sheet, because the puzzle is the instruction manual.

This is why solving one feels like an initiation rather than a transaction. He has never shipped solutions, a policy he's held since the early '80s, and the community guards it fiercely. Collectors on PuzzleMad and Allard's Puzzling Times describe the machining the way wine people describe a great vintage — pieces that slide "like steel on wet ice," tolerances so fine a stray internal burr can jam the whole mechanism.

And here's the insider bit: many of his boxes are individually numbered, often with two figures — collectors believe one is the batch, one the unit. So your copy isn't just a puzzle, it's a numbered artifact from a run that may never be repeated. That scarcity isn't marketing. It's just how a one-man Dutch workshop operates.

This is the question nobody answers honestly, so I will. The retail listings you'll find — Puzzle Master, Logica, JP Games, Kubiya, the odd Amazon and Etsy page — are distributor stock of a handful of his designs (First Box, Hexagon, Lotus, First Cross, Revenge Lock). They're real, they're legitimate, and they're often the only practical route for a US buyer. But they are not where the deep catalog lives.

Wil's real channel is almost comically old-school: an email mailing list. Collectors describe him, affectionately, as "an international man of mystery" with essentially no web storefront. Most weeks he sends subscribers a plain-text update of what he has — his own designs plus rare puzzles he's hunted down — and you reply fast or you miss out. Orders settle over PayPal. Multiple reviewers note he's genuinely lovely to deal with: quick to answer, helpful, and known to set a puzzle aside until a buyer can scrape the funds together.

So the playbook is two-track. For the headline pieces in this ranking, buy from a reputable distributor when stock appears — links below. For everything deeper (the Cylinders, the Butterfly, the limited oddities), get yourself on the list through the collector community. Be ready to move the day the newsletter lands. The patient, plugged-in buyer always eats first here.

The First Box is the puzzle that anchors every Strijbos conversation, and the legend is real. Around 1984 he hand-built just six copies for the giants of the hobby — Jerry Slocum, Nob Yoshigahara, Dick Hess, Edward Hordern, and James Dalgety among them. Those originals were in Formica-like material; the modern, pursued version is the 765g blue anodized aluminum cube, 70mm on every side, his signature engraved on the face.

The task sounds trivial — get the rod out — and is anything but. No tapping, no magnets, no external tools. And here's the part worth knowing before you buy: reviewers stress that the production mechanism is engineered so that it's virtually impossible to fluke a solution. You don't stumble into the answer; you understand it or you don't. The flip side, as one seasoned blogger admits, is that even after you've solved it the why can be maddeningly hard to put into words — the method works flawlessly yet resists easy explanation. Expect there to be only a couple of real "stages," yet expect understanding the hidden mechanism to eat an entire weekend.

Now the secret almost nobody mentions: peer into the small hole on the bottom and a tiny sad face looks back at you. It's Wil's wink — the box quietly mocking you until you've earned the solve. Fun bit of lore from Allard's review: Wil redesigned the production version to remove the need for a separate loose tool, specifically because he feared frustrated owners might "purchase a large hammer." That's the whole man in one sentence.

Start with the Hexagon, full stop. If the First Box is a thesis, the Hexagon is a haiku — a 58mm piece engineered to teach rather than torment. Difficulty sits around 2/10; a focused evening cracks it, opening onto three small compartments. It is, deliberately, the gentlest doorway into Wil's universe.

But don't mistake "easy" for "lesser." The Hexagon's job is to install a feeling in your hands: the realization that the tolerances are the art. When you feel parts move with that frictionless, machined-to-microns glide, you finally understand why collectors pay four figures for the hard stuff. Reviewers describe holding their first Strijbos and simply marveling at the engineering before they've solved a thing. That's the Hexagon doing exactly what it was built to do.

It's also the most reliably in-stock piece in his catalog — Puzzle Master, JP Games, Kubiya and Amazon carry it consistently — which matters enormously for a maker whose other work vanishes for years. So my standing advice to anyone puzzle-curious: buy the Hexagon, live with it for a week, then decide whether you want to fall down the rest of this rabbit hole. Most people, once they've felt the metal, do. Consider it the tasting menu before you commit to the chef's table that is the First Box.

The Lotus Flower is the grail, and it carries a piece of history almost no casual buyer knows. The mechanism most reviewers chase — remove the circular aluminum disc and rod to reveal the hidden lotus — descends directly from a wooden "Loto" padlock Wil made back in 1979. The blue-aluminum Lotus is the evolved, perfected child of a 45-year-old idea. When you hold it, you're holding the end of a very long thought.

Distributors bill it as one of the "most difficult secret padlocks," and the solve satisfaction is spoken of in reverent terms — one veteran said the thrill of cracking it was matched only by the First Box. That's the company it keeps. Pricing typically lands around the $200–250 range when you can find it, with secondary copies running higher.

Here's my honest counsel, and it doubles as the catch: this is not a first puzzle. At 10/10 it can occupy a serious solver for a month or more, and a beginner will simply bounce off it. Buy the Lotus when you've already felt the First Box click — when you understand Wil's grammar of tools-revealing-tools. Bought too early, it's a beautiful paperweight that quietly judges you. Bought at the right moment, it's the most satisfying solve in the entire aluminum canon, and a genuine membership card to the smallest, most stubborn club in mechanical puzzling.

Two corners of the catalog reward the obsessive, and both teach you to solve blind. The First Cylinder (and its siblings, the Aluminium and Washer Cylinders) hands you a sealed tube whose lid spins freely and depresses a few millimeters. Shake it and it rattles — but, as one reviewer put it, "how many things??" You solve these by sound and feel, tracking ball bearings you can sometimes glimpse through a base hole. The Cylinders also wear that telltale dual numbering — one blogger found 03 on the lid and 10 on the base and guessed batch-then-unit. Pure Strijbos: nothing external, just geometry, gravity, and your ears.

Then there's the Revenge Lock, and its lore is my favorite in the whole catalog. It's also catalogued as "The Wanderer" — and the name has a true backstory. Inspired by Gary Foshee's lock work, Wil built a prototype; when a tester beat that prototype by an unintended, unorthodox route, Wil re-jigged the internals to force every solver to begin from the true starting position — no shortcuts, no starting halfway. The lock also gained a small internal element Wil calls the wanderer — a nod to the puzzle-maker himself, who spends most of his life wandering the world hunting and building puzzles — which is why the finished lock now carries the subtitle The Wanderer. The full sequence is a saga: discover your number, open the shackle, extract the brass key, free that wandering element, then reassemble it all and re-seat the lock in its frame. Gruelling 9–10/10. This is endgame Strijbos — buy it knowing the reassembly alone can swallow weeks.

Wooden boxes are romantic, tactile, centuries-deep in tradition. So why do Strijbos's aluminum pieces command multiples of comparable wood on the secondary market? Dimensional stability. Sequential discovery lives or dies on tolerances measured in fractions of a millimeter, and wood swells, shrinks, and warps with every season. Aluminum doesn't. A First Box solved in 1984 solves identically in 2026 — same feel, same glide. Anodizing even deepens with handling; the blue gets richer rather than worn. The precision is the craftsmanship.

Now the reframe most buyers miss, and I'll be straight with you. This guide ranks the First Box as his iconic debut, and as his first box, that holds. But his genuinely first design was the Aluminum Cross — conceived in 1980 after a visit to James Dalgety's collection in Over Wallop, England. He made only a few samples, then waited 32 years to release it widely. The modern First Cross is its accessible heir: gravity-and-spring driven, no magnets, no rotation. The trap that gives it character is reassembly — taking it apart is one puzzle; putting it back is the real one, even after you've seen every piece.

So when you hold a Strijbos, you're not holding a 40-year-old hobby. You're holding a 45-year-old idea, machined to a consistency human hands can't match, in a metal built to outlast you. That's the collector's verdict, and it's why the waitlists never really end.