Shooting the Moon
When I was a kid (I’m not sure I have a handle on exactly when), I was given a game called Shooting the Moon. It was one of these wooden table games of coordination that families like to have around during the holidays to keep family members amused in good, healthy activities that help them stay away from mind-numbing TV watching. There must be people out there who make these games up and decide that they are great wholesome fun for the whole family, but I’m very unclear how that process comes to pass. With those puzzle games where metal pieces are intertwined and the trick is to find the way to untangle them, its easier to imagine how that comes about. I can envision a farmer or farm kid sitting in the barn on a winter day when its too cold to go out and deciding that its high time he untangled some of the gear he has stored on some old wooden workbench. Those long iron hobnails that got bent and distorted that got thrown into a box probably got all jumbled up and tangled. Untangling the mess was challenging but had a rewarding feeling in the end when the task was done. The farmer found personal pride and accomplishment in the detangling and decided that it was a fun activity, so he got out his pliers and did some metal bending to make some puzzles where you had to do multiple manipulations to crack the code and get the pieces apart. He then proudly brought these bits of metal into the house and challenged his children to untangle them as a fun holiday activity. That all hangs together as a likely origin of some of these puzzle games.
People tend to either like or dislike puzzles and I sense that it has to do with the extent of analytical mindset and the patience of people as to which category they fall into. I rate myself as being somewhere in the middle. I like the challenge of attacking a problem, but I tend to be short on patience and grow weary of the task if I cannot find a solution in a fairly brief period of time. When I get frustrated by failure, I find myself asking whether what I am doing is worthwhile. If the answer is yes, I probably stick with it. If the answer is no or generally unattainable, I am likely to abandon the challenge and call it silly or stupid. There are other people who find nothing silly about sticking with a puzzle to the bitter end and find great satisfaction in the completion, only to put puzzle back in its unsolved state for others to labor over.
The Rubin’s Cube was certainly one of the great puzzles of all time and some people spent hours working to crack the code of how to manipulate the plastic squares so that they all aligned by color. Once they had cracked the basic code, these same people worked on their speed of resolution and it was fascinating to see someone bobble a Rubin’s Cube in their hands as the twisted and turned the pieces in unintelligible ways to us mere mortals, only to find that Voila! Moment and proudly declare oneself the winner. I, like many people I imagine, attributed great intelligence to people who could do the Rubik’s Cube and almost Godlike genius to people who could trick it so that they did it at blinding speed or while playing chess or eating an apple of something equally arbitrary. When I picked up a Rubik’s Cube I would get frustrated and throw it on the sofa after about 10 twists as I saw my solutions create more problems than they solved. I guess my mind is limited in the degrees of complexity it can embrace. Can you imagine the kind of mind it took to create it?
Erno Rubik is a Hungarian architect and designer who was raised by a father who was a precision glider airplane designer and mechanic. His design work, and specifically his teaching, led him to use a hobby as a puzzle maker to create the famous Rubik’s Cube in the late 1970’s. He created it to give his students a challenge in three-dimensional thinking. He used wooden blocks and rubber bands to create a cube that could be partially manipulated in multiple dimensions and required both an understanding of perspective and a strategic thought process to solve the puzzle through anticipatory movements of the parts of the cube. He patented his puzzle and it very quickly caught fire all around the world and won numerous Toy of the Year awards for its creativity and finesse. There have been over fifty books written about Rubik’s Cube and the theory behind its construction and solution. The toy has gone through several iterations and changes and along the way has made Rubik fabulously wealthy.
I have sometimes wondered why I do not gravitate towards cracking the Rubik’s Cube puzzle and I think I have an answer. It does not give me any interim steps to be proud of and therefore does not encourage me to continue as I get closer to a solution. Every time I think I’ve made progress, I am confounded by a stumbling block (literally) and feel I have gone down a wrong path, whether that’s true or not. It confuses and frustrates me and there is little joy in the interim process. I feel that if I did solve it, I would not know I had until the final move. That is a clear reflection of the simplicity of my dimensional thinking, I suppose.
The Shooting the Moon game is entirely different and I, for one, love it. It is a simple construct of a wooden base with two metal rails attached at one end and free to be spread apart at the other and that are tilted uphill from the attached end. A steel ball bearing the size of a ping pong ball is placed on the rails at the attached lowest end. By pulling apart the rails, you cause the steel ball to start rolling what seems to be uphill. In fact, based on the shape of the sphere and the alignment of the rails, of course, by widening the rails you are giving the ball a downhill run to take along the rails. But at some point the ball falls through the rails into a carved cup that has a score attached to it. The objective of the game is to get the ball to fall in the highest scoring cup (that being the one at the “top” of the rail ramp). If you succeed in getting it all the way up to the top-most cup you have shot the moon. Hence the game’s name.
I have literally spent hours playing with this game over the years and after not playing it for some time, it draws me back immediately. The reason is that there is a motion of spreading and then bringing together the rails at an exacting pace as you “feel” the ball starting to roll toward you. It is incredibly satisfying when you get the motion just right and literally “shoot” the ball towards you up the ramp and into the topmost cup. It takes time to master the motion, but the great thing, to me anyway, is that along the way you are encouraged by getting into higher and higher score cups as you perfect your skill. Also, you can’t get too cocky because you have to risk dropping the ball prematurely to get it positioned to shoot uphill and that seems to be a point that gets affected by ambient temperature and probably things like humidity and other physics factors that impact the wood and the steel.
I haven’t played this game for some time now and have long since lost my game board, but today I saw the toy advertised online and remembered what great fun I have derived from it in the past. I am going to order a new game today and by the holidays I will once again be shooting the moon.