Undercover

Phil Wigfield’s latest creation is excellent. If that’s all you wanted to hear before buying a copy, you can stop right here, head over to his shop and grab yourself a copy… when it comes back into stock. (It will, trust me!)

Assuming you wanted a little more on the topic, here are some of my thoughts, however, keeping within my avoidance of spoilers (IMHO) and my normal predilection for popping comments into my blog posts that folk who’ve already solved it will recognise and (hopefully) resonate with – this blog post might need to be a little shorter than usual. ;-)

I managed to grab a copy from Phil at MPP a couple of weeks back – it was a little covert – I gave him a pile of notes and helped myself to another neat little wooden box from Phil’s crate of them… and then spent several days of picking it up and trying something new I’d thought of… having pretty rapidly exhausted all of the usual sorts of things I expect to try on a puzzle that looks like this one…

You can see how big it is in the pictures, but if you’re one of those strange individuals who’s never seen a Two Pound coin in the flesh, I can tell you that Undercover is about 0.000462299 furlongs in length. (You’re welcome!) 

It’s a neat little puzzle that you can fiddle with all day without picking up a repetitive strain injury - and that might be useful as I suspect that some folks are going to spend a very long time “solving” this one… or rather, not solving it. <insert slightly evil grin here>

I had a lot of small spurts at trying to solve this one and found a lot of ways to not solve it… I was starting to have flashbacks to the first time I encountered a certain feature on the Silver Revo – and that was giving me chills.

It was only after a week or two that I happened to ask my mate Ali a very specific question and he was kind enough to give me an answer that didn’t spoil things for me, but it did make me think… differently… and that was the key I needed.

From there I managed to make some decent progress and soon enough I was looking at Phil’s rather neat handmade innards… he does take a lot of pride in his work – and he deserves to be proud of not only his workmanship, but of this design as well. He had me guessing and second-guessing for weeks and then when I did find the proverbial key to unlock it all, I didn’t feel let down at all – if anything it gave me even more respect for this puzzle…

I really like it and I hope that Phil has many more good ideas to come…