SEE THE STRIPES

Moving from dots (Find the Dots, 2017) to stripes, Mansfield offers 10 paper puzzles—some of which may send even Rubik’s Cube masters screaming from the room.

Each requires finding a certain colored stripe (or, in the capper, nine) that has been uniquely concealed or segmented. For some that simply requires peering beneath flaps or, for an accordion-folded pop-up, turning the page to a certain angle—but mostly it’s not that easy. A pink stripe, for instance, is only revealed by moving three pull tabs in a particular order to particular positions; a “dark-green” stripe remains hidden until a strip of yellow acetate happens to be folded over a blue bar that is, at the outset, nonadjacent. Other solutions require folding many small, creased flaps in straight or diagonal directions and in proper sequences. The engineered constructs are not arranged by difficulty or any other evident order, and aside from some pre-creasing there are no hints or shortcuts to preserve the mental well-being of less-focused or -patient victims.

Challenging pop-up posers.