Apologies for the tumbleweed recently – I’m back on it now…
Just over a week ago now we held our third virtual Midlands
Puzzle Party – unable to get together in person, we invite our puzzling friends
from around the world to join us on Zoom and either just chat about puzzles,
play along with some vaguely puzzle-related activities (spoiler alert – some of
those are really tenuous!) or just listen in to the banter –
whatever floats your boat.
This time we stuck to more or less the same formula again
for the morning afternoon and evening sessions, and Steve pointed out that we should
probably consider playing around with the batting order a bit if we run another of
these things so that the guys who can just about stay awake during the morning
session get a go at the Pu(b)zzle Quiz next time and the folks who can only
join us in the evening get a chance to have some general chit chat. We’ll
probably stop short of judging the competitions before we release the
challenges, although I’m not convinced that will necessarily change the
ultimate winners given Big-Steve’s approach to scoring.
The main meat of the morning session was literally just some
puzzle chat from the assembled masses. I worked my way around the list of
puzzlers online asking them what they were working on (puzzle-wise) at the
moment and what they thought of it. Jack showed us an entire table-full of what
looked like a wonderful new sequential discovery box – cue LOTS of interest! We
met a couple of new puzzlers, including Tamsin from somewhere in the Midlands –
so it’s ironic that we met her for the first time on Zoom given her proximity
to our usual meeting place. Big Brian showed us the latest addition to his
grotto: a running tap floating in mid-air made entirely from scratch – good on
yer, mate! Stuart Moskovitz joined us for the first time and fitted right in,
so hopefully he’ll be back for more at some point.
Helpfully I remembered to record the first session, so the
recording of the morning session is over here for anyone who missed it.
At the end of the session we told folks about our Limerick
competition – launched complete with rules in limerick form from the Big-Nick
himself:
"There once was a puzzler called
Nick",
Is how you must start your lim-rick.
Be clever, not crude.
And try to include...
Something puzzling or oxymoronic.
We also launched the (now traditional) scavenger hunt,
posting the list on the our Facebook page and inviting people to show us the
puzzle they most regretted buying, their best bargain buy, the puzzle with the
happiest memory and a bunch more designed to make people think a little
differently about their puzzle stashes and tell us some stories about them.
Nick and Steve had also pulled together a bunch of rebus
puzzles for folks to try their hands on between the first two sessions – the
full file is available over here for anyone who wants to have a bash at them.
Each page should clue to a puzzle designer and a puzzle name
– for example:
…clued to STEW / ART
/ COUGH / INN / (a) WOOKIE / HOLE – so Stewart Coffin’s Wookie Hole.
Some of them are wonderfully groan-worthy and Big-Steve did a fantastic job of
guiding the afternoon audience through a live solve of them all – complete with
some loud groans interspersed with some truly hearty guffaws. (Thanks to Nick
and Steve for compiling those!)
All the way through the tour, Brian took questions from the assembled
puzzlers, patiently describing how he prefers to do things and showing us all
the tools along the way. What surprised me most of all was the little Byrnes Model
Machines model maker’s saws that we uses for cutting all his bits and pieces – with
Brian joking that some of his mates refer to his Barbie table saws – but you
cannot fault the quality of the stuff he produces – Barbie tables saws or not…
At one point during the tour there was a lovely throwaway
line from Brian about having built his house… so someone asked him about that
and he recounted having spent many months building his geodesic kit-house around
working his day-job… then he took us outdoors to give us a view of the place
and it looks brilliant… really a wonderfully humble man of many, many talents!
Thank you so much for sharing your passion and your workshop with us, Brian!
It was at about this point on the day that I realised that I had
blundered, royally – I had not hit the record button on the Zoom session, so
there is no recording of Brian’s fabulous session, or indeed of Big-Steve’s
group solve of the rebii – that’s the plural of rebus, right? ;-)
Sorry!
The evening session started off with an announcement from
James about the future of his amazing puzzle collection. After years of trying
to find a collector or an institution who will take it off his hands and keep
it all together in a way that keeps it available for puzzlers, Rox and George
have stepped forward and agreed to take on this massive responsibility. Rox
then showed us around the extra house they’ve bought to house the
collection and talked to us about their plans for the collection – including how
they’re going to make sure that it’s definitely accessible to puzzlers to play
with! George and Rox: May your endeavours be wonderfully successful!
After the big announcement, Big-Steve stepped up with his judging
of the scavenger hunt competition: each entry was talked through by the entrant,
telling us how they’d selected each of their entries with Steve awarding each
entrant a gold star or award of some description – of course by the end of the
judging he realised the error of his ways being totally unable to pick an overall
winner and deciding that everyone who’d taken part, had won… very New Agey!
Nick sportingly did a great job of judging the limerick
competition, based on the opening line “There once was a puzzler called Nick”. (NO
prize for guessing that he hadn’t chosen the opening line!) Several people had
a go, although some clearly didn’t really understand the traditional structure
of the limerick – opting more for what could most generously be described as “free
verse”. The winner, one A Morris, had no such trouble producing the wonderfully
forgettable:
There once was a puzzler called Nick.
A collector and true fan-a-tic
Misidentified as Nico
Though some say he’s Chico?
His knowledge is “très magnifique”
…managing to introduce several of our beloved MPP memes and including
a magnificent final French rhyme in there!
I feel that the other Brass Monkey also deserved calling out
for his excellent introduction of a dubious final phrase with a perfectly innocent
build-up.
There once was a puzzler called Nick
Who could not solve disentanglements in
a tic
When he got in mess,
He called a fellow named Hess,
Who turned out to be a right clever Dick
Nice one Monkeys!
Frank then amused us all with a(nother) great a Pu(b)zzle
quiz. Once again there were questions about puzzles and a number of wonderfully
random subjects – a section on pretty weird comparisons and even a series of
timed maze solves – complete with the imperative trick questions along the way
– greeted with the regulation amount of audience groans!
The lead changed hands several times and somehow, I
contrived to end up winning the thing, although nobody would have known that as
I was competing under the catchy name of “Just another Nick, nothing to see
here” for some reason.
We really enjoyed ourselves over the course of the day and I
need to thank Frank, Steve, Ali, Nick and Louis for contributing to the puzzles, the planning, running things on the day and grabbing stacks of screenshots while I was rabbiting on. Cheers guys!
…and finally if you want to see the recording of the evening
session, here it is.
From the beginning I thought that pictures were important and
I’ve tried over the years to stick to the same standard white background (although
the light tents and what-have-you have changed over the years as I’ve sought
easier set-ups) and used the same £2 coin to give an indication of the size of
the puzzles – well except for that one time, but I think I got away with it.
;-) As a result, I can usually recognise
my pictures whenever anyone “borrows” them – like the time when a re-seller
used one of my pics on their web shop and hadn’t even noticed that the variant
of the puzzle they were selling wasn’t actually the same as the one in my photo
they’d swiped… they aren’t around anymore. 
