The Workshop
Every part is on the bench the wrong way round. Turn each one until the run is true, and build your machine a piece at a time.
Every part of a machine is on the bench, and every one of them has been put down the wrong way round.
Turn each part until the run is true: the pipe leaves the inlet, passes through every part on the bench, and arrives at the outlet with no joint left open. Arrow keys move the spanner from part to part and Enter turns whatever is under it a quarter turn; Backspace turns it back the other way. A tap does the same as Enter. That is the whole of it — there is nothing else to learn before the first press.
The interesting part is that you are not inventing the route. The route already exists; it is hidden inside a pile of parts that have been jumbled. An end fitting has to point somewhere, so the part beside it has to face back. A part with two connectors in a straight line cannot turn a corner. You work outward from what you are sure of, and the machine appears.
The five modules
Each module teaches exactly one new thing, and each one asks a genuinely different question rather than the same question in new clothes:
- Fit it up — close every joint and get every part onto the run.
- Riveted — some parts are already right and will not turn at all. They are not in your way; they are the thing to reason outward from.
- Valves — an arrow part only passes one way. A straight part looks the same after half a turn, so this is the one part you can seat perfectly and still have in backwards.
- Seized — a seized part will not turn until the run has actually reached it. Now the question is what order you are allowed to work in.
- Housings — a sealed part hides its own shape. You can see how far you have turned it, but not what is inside, so you work out what it must be from the parts on either side of it.
Each module holds twelve puzzles and opens the next one after eight, so a puzzle you happen to dislike never blocks the way.
The machine is the point
Every puzzle you finish fits one more piece into the contraption drawn at the top of the page, and every twelve of them finish a whole module of it — a gear train, a manifold, a rack, a mirror cell, a dial. It is drawn above the bench rather than below it because it is the reason to come back: not a score going up, but your machine further along than it was yesterday.
Finishing a module also opens another workshop. There are four — a clockmaker's, a waterworks, a greenhouse and an observatory — and the first is yours to choose straight away. None of them changes a single rule; they are only clothes and different names for the same five modules.
There is no clock anywhere in this. Nothing here is a test of how fast you can press a button. Take a whole afternoon over one bench if you want to. Turning a part the wrong way costs nothing at all: three more turns, or one Backspace, puts it back exactly where it was.
What is remembered, and where
Which puzzles you have cleared, how many stars each one earned, which module and workshop you are on, and how many you have solved first time. All of that is written on your own device and none of it is sent anywhere — there is no account, no name, nothing about you at all, only which puzzles were solved. If your browser is set to block sites from storing anything, the workshop still plays in full; it simply will not remember, and it will say so rather than quietly forgetting.
Stars only ever go up. Going back to a puzzle you already cleared can improve what you scored on it and can never take anything away.
You need JavaScript for this one
The workshop is a game rather than a page, so it needs JavaScript switched on to play. With it switched off you get this description and nothing will pretend otherwise — there is no empty box below waiting for a machine that cannot be built. Everything else on this site reads perfectly well without it.