The Doppit Almanac · No. 08
Hoistit, a daily counterweight puzzle
One cabin rises, another must fall
What it is
Hoistit is a Doppit original, No. 08 in the almanac, and the only puzzle in the collection with an elevator licence. Brass cabins hang in a wall of shafts, roped together over rooftop pulleys. Haul one cabin upward and its rope-partners sink by the same measure. That is the entire physics, and the entire problem.
Your job is to park the whole building: every cabin at rest in a door frame, every counted floor honest, and nothing left swinging.
How it plays
The house rules are posted in the lobby.
- Doors are the framed panels. Every cabin must come to rest in one, and no two cabins may share a square.
- Cabins are roped into linkages. Drag one and its partners glide the opposite way.
- A number in the margin fixes how many cabins stop on that floor. A 0 means none at all.
- A linkage counts toward the tallies only once every one of its cabins rests in a door. Loose cabins hang as pale ghosts.
- Rings and strikes on doors are notes for you, and Undo steps back one move.
The difficulties
Three buildings open daily. The practice building never closes. Easy settles in thirty seconds to a minute. Medium is one to three minutes of rope arithmetic. Hard runs three to six and makes you weigh both ends of every rope twice. Expert has hard's own nine shafts and eleven floors, more spare doors to rule out, and a floor of twelve nested what-ifs against hard's eight. A new board hangs every day, gratis.
Play today's board