A few of us have been making the annual trip across the
channel to Wil’s legendary King’s Day Puzzle Parties for a while now, and now
that we seem to be past all the international lock-downs, Steve, Ali and I made
the trip across once again this year.
We met up in Eindhoven where Louis picked the lads up from
the airport and collected me from the train station (I’d flown into Schiphol).
We checked into our hotel, grabbed a few puzzles and then headed to Louis’
where he’d laid out a fabulous spread for lunch. Well-feasted we hauled out the
puzzles and settled into the usual routine of “Here you’ll like this one”, “That’s
impossible” and “Aahhh, I really like that one!” with varying delays between them.
(Louis’ delays tended to be a lot shorter than ours for some reason.)
I’d taken along my copies of Karakuri Packing, Chained Lumbers
and Coin Wallet from Mine’s latest release knowing that the guys probably hadn’t
played with them yet… they all went down really well, although Steve stopped
short on one or two of them, choosing to delay any gratification in favour of
respecting the designers… I’m sure that’s what he said.
Several of us had a play with Louis’ copy of Tri-Rodspan – a
12-piece co-ordinate motion puzzle designed by Bruce Patterson and modelled by George
Bell. I’d printed out a set of pieces just before I left on this trip so I was
keen to see how easily they went together – fortunately Steve was keen to see
how easily Louis’ copy could be disassembled so I got the chance to assemble
it. Unfortunately I didn’t pay quite enough attention to the colours and ended
up reassembling them in a totally uncoordinated fashion… which set off some
serious OCD twitching and a “proper assembly” was undertaken, only for Steve to
spin it and start the whole process all over again…
I spent a while fiddling around with a copy of a
tray-packing puzzle (Amsterdam?) calling for different levels of Dutch houses to
be made in a frame… I managed a couple and felt quite good about myself until Louis
promptly went and found several new solutions in a matter of minutes. (Apparently
there are several challenges!)
Somewhere around 6pm Louis ordered a massive pile of pizzas which
magically arrived at the door a short while later, so we feasted again… plenty
pizzas disappeared include some of the famous cinnamon and sugar pizzas that
were left for the dessert round.
At some point Mieke prompted us to see about playing an
escape room and she and Louis then managed to find one that had a slot
available for later that evening, so a short while after dinner we all piled into
the car and headed off to a nearby town to help our mate Barry get his meth lab
sorted before the cops raided it – and then we played an escape room.
The room had a few really good surprises – the first
transition caught us all by surprise and made us all smile – there was some
darkness-induced frustration in the second phase due to the flashlight we were supposed
to have not being available as it was broken (as we discovered afterwards) and
then the third phase was really well done… we made a bit of a meal of one of the
main puzzles and that slowed us down a lot, but on the whole we cranked through
it all pretty quickly and we enjoyed the room. It was fun to be on the other
side of the law in a game…
Back to Louis’ for a
little more puzzling before he deposited us back at our hotel for some sleep
ahead of the main event on Sunday.
He duly collected us after breakfast and we headed off to
Venlo where we were the first the arrive with Wil literally just having
finished all his preparations. There were warm greetings and plenty catchings up
over a quick coffee and tart before the rest of the known puzzling world began arriving.
The Monkeys had taken along a few copies of Burrly Legal to
offload and custom-made Wil a six-piece Burrtle Opener to add to one of his collections
– exceptionally well-played The Two Brass Monkeys!!!
The weather on Sunday was fantastic, so the outside tables
were put to very good use, with Oskar in his usual spot with piles of new
3D-printed designs inviting anyone to have a fiddle.
I spent quite a while
getting myself hopelessly entangled in a copy of Rainbow Stairs – and just when I thought I was making some progress, Oskar sat down next to me
and said “You realise that’s a variation of the Fifteen puzzle don’t you?” – a
particularly cruelly-timed comment given I’d literally just got myself to the
point where I needed to swap two pieces around… Thankfully(!) he went on to
point out that it didn’t have the same parity constraints, so I might actually
be able to solve it… and a while later I did indeed manage to align all of my
rainbow’s stairs.
While I was doing that Steve was frantically twiddling the
handle on
Let That Sink In until it did in fact sink in (or out) and then Oskar
talked us through the theory behind it – I loved the bit where he assumed we
could all instantaneously multiply 7,11 and 13 in our heads while he was
telling us about the design. (It’s 1,001, which is interesting because the
opposing gears multiply out to 1,000…)
Several of us had a go at his Screw Gears – and I for one
can confidently say that I did not come up with a helpful strategy for solving
them – over dinner I did manage to almost assemble the screws in precisely the
wrong order and I considered that a major achievement.
Michel was handing out copies of a safety pin challenge that
I enjoyed playing with while I was writing this blog post – if you want to have
a bash yourself, put three safety pins together in such a way that they won’t
come apart, but if any one of the three pins is opened, all of the pins come
apart.
It was great to catch up with Jan Willem again and to relieve
him of a couple of old Karakuri boxes that he had spare copies of… and in time-honoured
tradition when I went through airport security the next day, that was the one
thing they were interested in! (I suspect they’re all closet Japanese puzzle
box aficionados.)
I spent quite a while playing with some extremely rare wonderful
old Karakuri boxes from Wil’s collection over the course of the afternoon – a rare
treat indeed.
Frans was looking a lot less battered than he has been and
it was nice to catch up with him and Rob and Goetz and Michel and Rob (yes, the
other one) and Patrick and Christian… and no doubt several others that I chatted
or puzzled with over the course of the day… and have forgotten to mention.
At some point the crowds began thinning out and when Wil
received a call from his local restaurant he realised he totally missed his
booking slot… we all bundled into a few cars and headed into town for another fabulous
meal – with the obligatory puzzles on the table as usual. The food was superb,
the company excellent and it turned into another night to remember.
Once dinner was complete a few of us ended up back at Wil’s
for a little more puzzling and a lot more coffee – it’d been a long couple of days
for some of us – before Louis saw us safely back to our hotel somewhere after
midnight.
Thanks a stack to Wil for hosting us all on Sunday and
giving us another King’s Day to remember and to Louis for fetching and carrying
us over the weekend and entertaining and feeding us royally on the Saturday!
<Some pics courtesy of Wil as I didn't take enough myself!>
