Chapter One: The Thief

In 1905, French author Maurice Leblanc introduced the world to a charismatic aristocrat who often operated as a force for good from the opposite side of the law, a “gentleman thief” if you will, with the short story, “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin”. Lupin was fashioned as a brilliant detective and master of disguise who could best even the great Sherlock Holmes himself at solving great mysteries.

Much like that famous English detective, Lupin continues to be a source of inspiration for modern day tales, and finds himself at the center of an exciting new immersive adventure from ADnigma, the startup company of real life husband and wife team Arnaud and Daniela (and canine companion Ina) who are based in Luxembourg. Out of their mutual love for escape rooms and mechanical puzzles developed their current project, a series of escape room adventure puzzle boxes that are tied together around a larger mystery.

Their first box, The Lost City, is an inviting invitation into the story, which Daniela generously shared with me in great detail. “Arnaud and Daniela are both mechanical engineers. Daniela specialised with an MSc in Biomedical Engineering and Biomechanics, and Arnaud pursued a PhD in thermodynamics. We both worked in a medical device company in the R&D department, which is where we met. Daniela currently works full time as a project coordinator for the young scientists’ foundation and Arnaud works part time for a different medical device startup, where he did the mechanical design of an augmented reality headset. He is now mostly handling the regulatory aspects of the product.”

“Arnaud has always enjoyed Escape rooms and introduced Daniela to them. Once we played our first one together, we got hooked. We work great as a team and enjoy solving them together, even Ina has joined us on occasion (very useful as usual 😊). For our wedding we wanted to bring our passion to our guests, but an escape room was impractical. Having seen the concept of puzzle boxes, we thought it could be a great alternative and went for it. In 3 months, we designed from scratch a puzzle box tailored to our story and produced a small batch for the wedding. Seeing the enjoyment at the wedding and all the positive feedback we received, we decided to try and commercialize a puzzle box. The Luxembourg government and other institutions, such as the House of Entrepreneurship, really helped to set up the company and helped us with various subsidies, to ease the initial start up costs.”

“Despite never having had a puzzle box from him in our own hands, Jesse Born’s puzzle boxes creativity and his craftsmanship are impressive. Although we are great fans, inspiration has never really come from other designers. Arnaud likes to work with the material properties and design around that. Or sometimes work on specific interactions or innovative mechanics. By seeing other projects, we mostly learnt about what we like or don’t like in a puzzle box. Finally, a lot that inspires us is random things online we have seen, but also by travelling or our different cultural experiences, and research on subjects helps us in the design/illustration side. Living in Luxembourg, being from various origins, being surrounded by different cultures, also inspires us to have a bigger view of what we desire.”

Once the duo had committed (to each other, but also to the idea of creating an adventure puzzle box!) they realized they wanted to make a series of boxes, each in a different style, which would build the overarching story. “We wanted the first Puzzle Box to be a safe, which brought us to a thief, and then to Arsène Lupin, the famous gentlemen thief. Slowly it came together to the become “the Lost City”. It was important for us to work with the colours, to reflect the 1920’s Era. Arnaud then developed a few mechanisms, to which we then researched some stories from Arsène for the clues on the box. The corners of the box and the portrait relate to the Book “The countess of Cagliostro”, in which one learns of the 4 enigmas engraved on the magical mirror of Cagliostro. [Another idea] came from our wedding box, and the rest, well it just kind of popped into Arnaud’s head. We wanted a collectible token to offer a reward when the box is solved, so we needed a place to store it. The scroll was Daniela’s idea, based on an idea we had for the Wedding Box.”

The Lost City is an impressive example of the escape room puzzle box genre and it’s hard to believe it is the result of a team of two working out of their living room. The box itself has multiple steps and layers to work through, and like a good escape room provides all the clues but does not make it easy! The box is interactive, yielding dynamic secrets, tools and steps as you get closer and closer to the final goal. It was not an easy thing to bring into the world!

“Where to start 😉 The development went quite smoothly, although finding reliable suppliers took quite a bit longer than expected. We now have a strong supplier database that we can rely on, and we do not expect any future problems for the next box. One frustrating part was the packaging, we worked for about 6 months with a company, but they were so unresponsive, and their designs just kept disappointing us, so we switched to a new supplier quite late, which was a tough push to get the packaging ready on time. Additionally, we were working on getting the “Made in Luxembourg” Label, to be on the packaging, which was during the summer holidays, so it was a tight schedule but worked out in the end. Of course, all of this then got a bit chaotic 😊

We genuinely didn’t expect to sell so many Puzzle Boxes on Kickstarter, and we did not understand or imagine the issues on the scale up. Once we started the larger volume production, things got a bit tricky: - The laser cutter needed servicing; the lens got damaged, and the filters clogged up at a speed we had not anticipated (we had a lovely smell in the house), which meant a couple of weeks delay.

- The scale up also meant certain manufacturing processes had issues, like when glueing. When you glue a couple of gears there is no problem, when you glue 50 plus sides, and stack them, the glue releases vapours in a confined area and suddenly the gears are stuck (and 50 plus sides need reworking).

- The packaging, with its special design, ended up failing when we did the ISTA drop tests, so we had to rework every box, after having tried various ways of boosting the packaging. Meaning, we went from, take Puzzle box, place into primary packaging and then secondary, to adding multiple additional steps.

- We realised, as we precut parts, that of course, not each wood panel has the exact same colour or grain, so we had variety of colours on the Boxes, after the first batch of 100, we realised this and tried matching them better – something to consider for the next box and the manufacturing process.

- Remember that great scroll Idea Daniela had, she definitely regrets that design and its manufacturing process (but still loves the concept)! Glueing the paper on the toothpick, then rolling and glueing it again, was a challenge of patience 😊

We also had a few issues, once our Puzzle Boxes went out, the biggest issue being [a hidden tool] for example, so we changed the design slightly and implemented it for the following batches. We also roped in our parents to help us, as we did want to stick to a fair enough timeline for our backers, ultimately this brought other quality control issues with it, which we also need to be more careful about. It was one impressive learning curve, we are sure there is more to come, but we did have already quite a few lessons, that should help us out for the next Chapter😊”

The production value is of the highest caliber for a laser cut box, with an innovative mixed media and material format on the box itself, and high end packaging complete with beautiful artwork they developed with the Game Design Company. “They are mostly made of laser cut plywood. We are using both birch and poplar to take advantage of their different properties. Aside from wood, we also incorporate plastic parts, either laser cut, or 3D printed (resin or filament). And finally, we have a few off-the-shelf elements such as springs or magnets. Once all the parts have been manufactured, we proceeded to the assembly. Arnaud designed the puzzle box to be somehow modular. So, we assembled batches of sub-assemblies, which could then be used together to assemble the final Puzzle Box.

The KS campaign was a totally new experience for both of us. As engineers, we are not really salespeople and we worked with an amazing company that helped us promote the project before the campaign and guided us on how to design the campaign page. This was quite a ride; we had wanted to kick off our campaign in May. We did not realise how much work the campaign page would be, so that was quite a tough deadline. Additionally, just as we had planned to launch, our competitors were going to launch as well. That was quite a bit of a panic, but it all worked out in the end😊

Production scale up was also a learning curve for us. When you need to produce almost 500 products with about 150 parts in it, keeping an inventory is crucial and having space to store everything is easier said than done. All that organization was way more time consuming than what we expected. Having our family support, us, helped us catch up the delay but brought additional challenges. Not everyone is good at assembling everything. We had specific tasks for each of our family members and implemented further quality controls. It was quite a tough year, and there were moments where giving up just seemed the better option. It took a toll on us and our little Ina, but we got through it together. Somehow, we seem to complement each other really well😊 When one is down, the other takes charge and vice versa. We work very differently, and yet very well together😊”

The Lost City literally took over their lives and turned their home into the “lost apartment”. “Arnaud installed his office in one room and since the company’s creation intended to do the design and manufacturing in his office. It was big enough to fit a desk for any computer work, storage cabinets, production machines and an assembly bench. This was obviously without thinking that we would have to build close to 500 puzzle boxes! Storage space quickly expanded to the next room, Daniela’s office becoming a second assembly area and our living room turned out to be useful when our family were coming to help us – the third assembly area. All this turned the house into a big assembly line in the end and we were quite relieved (Ina included) to regain that space once we delivered all the boxes. Daniela would like to point out, that Arnaud has now additionally taken over the garage, we have invested in a CNC and other tools - she wishes she could put Arnaud in a garden shed😉

As mentioned, we had applied for the “Made in Luxembourg” Label, which we were officially awarded during a ceremony on the 7th of December. Due to having this label, the Chamber of Skilled Trades and Crafts in Luxembourg (who awards the label), gave us the opportunity during Christmas to participate in their pop-up store in one of the Malls in Luxembourg. We mainly participated to promote our Brand and first Puzzle Box, not expecting too much. On one of the days however, a woman walks in super excited, as she backed us on Kickstarter. She only just moved back to Luxembourg, and we happen to live very close to where she works. She was so happy to meet us, and it was so heartwarming to meet a backer in person.”

Arnaud and Daniela, the A and D behind ADnigma, are to be congratulated for succeeding at such an ambitious undertaking. Arnauld has plenty of ideas left and is hard at work on the next box in the series already. They have completed their initial Kickstarter and now offer the puzzle directly on their website. They plan to also offer custom boxes for corporate team building based on their original wedding box design. They are expanding their production capabilities, playing with mechanisms and materials, and planning the next best box in this popular genre. “We would like people to know, that we care deeply about our project, and we really go all in, we really want to make it special. We would also like to make a big shout out to our parents, to Françoise and Claude (Arnaud’s parents) and to Lino and Gillian (Daniela’s parents), who not only gave us their time to physically make our puzzle boxes, but who supported us in many other ways as well!”

The origins of this beautiful adventure to find the Lost City began with the beautiful adventure of the two creators, in preparation for their wedding.  Like me, they love to make cocktails, and in addition to designing their very own wedding puzzle box, they created special cocktails for their special day. They even shared them with me! As if that were not already more than enough, they sent me a very unique bottle of bitters which is truly representative of their home in Luxembourg, the Maagbitter Buff. Of course I had to make a cocktail with these bitters to celebrate Arnauld and Daniela and toast their remarkable creation.

Maagbitter, a potent digestif bitter, is a Luxembourg tradition which dates back to 1876 when it was first manufactured by Friedrich-Wilhelm-Ludwig Buff, a retired Luxembourgian officer of Dutch descent. The Buff family purchased the original recipe from doctor Herman Boerhaave, a well-regarded scientist of the day and professor of medicine at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, who perfected the bitters in 1720 as a stomach relief and digestive aid. Ludwig Buff, who brought the ancient recipe back to Luxembourg 150 years later, won a few gold medals in the 1890s for his efforts. In the 1930s the Pitz-Schweitzer company came into possession of the bitters and have been producing it ever since. Maagbitter can only be purchased in Luxembourg.

A dark, brooding and bitter digestive like Maagbitter, which is produced from a secret recipe of 15-20 herbs and botanicals, needs a strong, spirited backbone to stand up to in a cocktail or it will surely overwhelm the drink and be the only thing you can taste. A little goes a long way.

For some time I have been searching for a good puzzle to pair up with a classic rum cocktail called “Mundo Perdido” (Lost World) which was created by Jeff “Beachbum” Berry in 2009 for his famous San Francisco tiki mecca, Smuggler’s Cove. It’s full of dark molasses and cinnamon spice, and is a delicious drink. The Lost City from ADnigma provided the perfect setting to revisit this classic, and the addition of Maagbitter augmented the adventure in a wonderfully interesting way. Here’s to the spirit of adventure – the search for the Lost City begins! Cheers!

The Lost City (adapted from Jeff “Beachbum” Berry)

1 ½ oz Black Blended rum

½ oz Apple Brandy

¼ oz Maagbitter

¾ oz fresh lemon

½ oz Demerara cinnamon syrup

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail coupe.

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