Blind Panics
What do you do when you realise you need to design an exchange puzzle for an International Puzzle Party?
You enter a blind panic.
Not Ali though — he’s as cool as the proverbial cucumber.
At the 2025 International Puzzle Party in Tokyo, Ali presented Blind Panics. The goal is simple: swap the brass and stainless steel barrels from one column to the other. First you move the brass barrels over the monkey… then you bring the stainless ones back.
Blind Panics is our twist on the hard-to-find Panex Puzzle by Japanese designer Toshio Akanuma. And when we say twist, we mean that literally: to move a barrel from column to column it must be dropped into the void in the cap and twisted into place. To add to the confusion, the third column is hidden — not visible at all — hence the blind.
While the original Panex has a passing resemblance to the classic Tower of Hanoi, it is, in fact, much, much harder. The original version used 10 sliders and can take around 31,000 moves to solve. Ali was kind and only included five sliders… but he did hide a column, so you win some and you lose some.
Blind Panics is 3D printed, with brass and stainless steel sliders. The body of the puzzle is dark green, and the caps come in a random colour (because panic should always be a surprise).
For more information on the original Panex puzzle, Jaap has an excellent write-up. (https://www.jaapsch.net/puzzles/panex.htm)