About Pocket Workshop

Pocket Workshop is a set of small machines to understand and repair, starting with beam routing: one lamp, a few mirrors and a sensor on a cutting mat. It is made by Idistic, the product studio of TWINDLE NEDERLAND B.V. in the Netherlands.

The boards

The 39 campaign boards (3 tutorials and 36 puzzles) and 76 daily boards are original. The tutorials were designed by hand. The other boards were laid out by our own generator, which draws a random beam route and places mirrors, lenses and blocks along it; we then picked and named the boards and checked each one. The daily boards come from the same generator, but a program picks them (within the campaign’s range of effort for their size) and names them, with the same checks. Every board is verified to have exactly one solution by trying every arrangement of its turntables through two separately written beam tracers.

Within each bench, boards are ordered by an effort estimate: how much a player following the beam from the lamp would have to trace on wrong turns before finding the route. It is an estimate from a program, not a measurement of how hard people find each board.

Artwork and type

All artwork is drawn in code for this site. Text is set in Bricolage Grotesque, used under the SIL Open Font License.

No accounts, no ads

There are no accounts, purchases or ads. Your progress lives in your browser; see privacy. Questions, ideas or a confusing route: support@twindle.nl.