By the time my brain was being compressed like fine pasta out through my ears, my self-confidence had taken more than one impact and, although this may reveal too much about the ailing functions of my inner ear, I had suffered a few vertiginous moments that bordered on nausea.

This is Workworkwork, the latest effort from Blaž Gracar, the madman who gave us LOK and Abdec and All Is Bomb. Like the first pair of those titles, Workworkwork is a puzzle book, comb-bound and packaged with a transparent plastic sheet for doodling on with a dry-erase marker. Unlike your average sudoku or crossword, this is a necessity. There is no solving these puzzles on your first go. Instead, it takes practice, experimentation, and failure. So much failure.

The book’s early stages.

As with LOK and Abdec, Workworkwork is all about failure. It’s also about hidden rules, inscrutable meanings, a dash of meta-knowledge for how puzzles ought to work — so you can solve these the opposite way — and a click-point that’s more satisfying than the ignition of a gas stove.

Here, your task is to arrange polyform shapes into other polyform shapes, bending and turning them Tetris-like so that they fit together. It’s also not about that, because this is a puzzle book by Blaž Gracar, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Each of the game’s five chapters further distends the premise, but the basic gist is simple enough. By penning a single line from one diglett-dude to another, you draw the shapes together, pulling them taut as though by a string. Where the line exits one shape is where it will meet the next shape upon entering it, like a shoelace through two eyelets.

Right away, this demands a different mindset from LOK or Abdec. These are all spatial games, but Workworkwork is the most rotational of the group. More than once, I found myself tilting the entire book to get a fresh perspective on something. As someone who’s always struggled with Tetris’s less symmetrical polyominoes, the Zs and Ls that can’t be mirrored, this set my head spinning in a way that LOK and Abdec did not.

Oh no.

Which isn’t to say that Workworkwork is tougher. If anything, it’s significantly more straightforward. Gracar still plays coy with the rules, declining to explain every twist that appears in later chapters and leaving it up to players to suss out the particulars, but this is a far cry from the mystery vocabularies that marked his earlier puzzlers. It probably helps, too, that the answer key at the back hasn’t been partially defaced, as in Abdec, and that the answers themselves are lines rather than LOK’s cryptic grid coordinates.

To my surprise, that straightforwardness doesn’t always translate to intuitive solutions. Where LOK and Abdec felt natural to decode, with tall hurdles that still felt somehow surmountable as I sorted their puzzles into discrete sets, Workworkwork often left me scratching my head. It wasn’t uncommon, for instance, for me to turn to the next chapter, take one look at the new wrinkle Gracar was asking me to iron flat, and audibly whisper, “Oh no.” Here the puzzles are more self-contained, devoid of the previous cross-referencing to clarify your assumptions about the rules, but individually they’re real stumpers.

Which isn’t to say that my experience will be universal. I suspect Workworkwork will work work work (sorry) for those who found Gracar’s previous books too opaque. Figuring out rules happens to be one of my strengths; rotating blocks and approaching spatial problem from multiple angles, not so much. As Workworkwork progressed, I felt more and more like a kid who’d missed some essential unit in math class and was now keeping up his grade by cross-referencing every single problem with the answers from the back of the textbook.

Oh no oh no oh no.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement. True enough, this is the least I’ve been enamored with one of Gracar’s puzzle books. But it would still be inaccurate to say I didn’t appreciate the mind trip it took me on. Before the final chapter turned my head inside-out, I had settled into a nice rhythm, each puzzle unfolding by either cleverness or brute force, but either way proving satisfying in that same way as the tangled lexicons of LOK or Abdec. Workworkwork required more work on my part, and doesn’t quite hit the same highs as its predecessors. Still, for the most part, it was worth the effort.

A complimentary copy of Workworkwork was provided by the designer.

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