Remember back to your misspent youth (or recent adulthood) spent playing Dungeons and Dragons, and how your adventuring party sweated as your thief tried desperately to disarm all the traps before opening a treasure chest? It’s in that spirit that my friend Jay and I have exchanged trapped presents every Christmas for the past sixteen or so years.
When people ask me how to disarm a trap I’m giving Jay I’ll often joke that “I just design them, disarming them is his problem,” but I actually like to know that I can get through it before I hand it off to Jay. This year’s trap almost had me stumped, and I spent almost as long figuring out how to disarm my trap as I did designing it. The trap is even more maddening because there’s nothing hidden about it — after you open the box you can plainly see all the trap mechanisms through a glass dome, just as plainly as you can see it’ll be almost impossible to get any tools at them without setting it off.
I’ve just added a write up and video of the design, called Under Glass, to my traps gallery, and I’ll be adding a write-up on Jay’s trap (which was quite cool this year) in the coming week or so.