NPP 2023

Frank and I almost share a birthday, and that’s a good enough excuse for a puzzle party, every year. There’s some debate over when the first Northern Puzzle Party was, since Frank and I didn’t know about the first one – sure, we were both there, we just didn’t realise it was actually an NPP, anyhoo – about a week ago we had another…

Some of the lads drove up on the Friday and had an early start on the puzzling and some games – one of which saw Steve repeatedly chasing Frank’s wife around the ground floor of the house waving something – don’t ask – I have no idea.

Gill and I headed up on Saturday morning a bit earlier than we usually do having taken the hounds to their weekend holiday home the night before – glad we did that as the traffic was really nice and light – it was certainly better than when Andrew and Dan headed up the road a couple of hours later!

As we arrived, we were handed a hot drink and a large selection of cakes, to which we added a tub of Gill’s delicious honeycomb rocky road. Mike and Tamsin had already arrived and the Monkeys plus Rich were well-settled-in from the day before. There were one or two puzzles on the dining room table and the kitchen island already… I probably didn’t need to bring a crate of puzzles along.

I’d brought along a bunch of puzzles that I hadn’t solved yet in the hopes that some kind soul would solve them for me, and that sort of worked once or twice – folks would take the bait and then duly solve them in front of me – usually without letting me see anything that might just resemble a spoiler – and then scrambling them again… the one exception was Rich’s solve of my copy of Climburr – he duly dismantled it and then “reassembled” it in a configuration that has had me scratching my head for a week now – unable to either take it apart or actually put it into the proper assembled position. (That’s what mates are for, eh?!)

Several folks successfully solved my copy of Triple Product and waved it in front of my snout snuggly inside its little acrylic box and I still have no idea how to solve it…

Steve and I spent a while playing with a pre-production copy of Oskar’s Screw Pack – seven interacting screws screw into a large nut-shaped frame – we took turns at trying to build on one another’s’ logical deductions and until we’d jointly solved it in theory, and then started putting it together – at which point we realised there was another potential little issue – so we co-solved that one too and then had it all neatly reassembled… however, that wasn’t sufficient for our Steve – who then proceeded to find a lovely chaotic “solution” with all the screws at different heights – the perfect “assembly” to leave it in for those with OCD to worry to about.

Some time before lunch Andrew and Dan arrived having had a bit of a nightmare journey up the M6. Frank called Lunch and duly rolled out several trays of sandwiches and wraps – the Potts track-record of over-catering remains sound.

Sometime after lunch I tried to interest some folks in attempting my World Traveller Society Kickstarter adventure box… I’d had a little dabble at it a week or so earlier and solved the first puzzle, only to hit a brick wall of “This is tough, I’m going to need help – why don’t I take this along to NPP and get some help from some real puzzle solvers?!” During the course of the rest of the day several people did indeed pitch in and try to help – Tamsin did a sterling job of opening up the first compartment in spite of me giving her a duff steer on where to line up the answer on the first padlock. That provided a veritable trove of intriguing looking artefacts and very little idea of where to go next… so we tried a few avenues and generally came up blank on most of them. After some serious head-scratching and not a lot of progress, we elected to try some hints and ended up wandering down a long and winding road right into a rabbit hole… having traced through all of the hints, and the actual answer – we found ourselves a bit lost as to how the heck we were supposed to settle on that answer, so we tried another puzzle – only to find ourselves in a similar position once more, and then not getting much joy from following an extended trail of hints and eventually the solution itself… so we decided it was clearly meant for far cleverer puzzlers than us, and went back to playing with our other puzzles.

Dan had brought along his (half-sized) copy of Goh Pitt Khiam’s Numlock with a super valuable Israeli Scheckel secured in place… and it duly became the object of an arms race between Steve-the-destroyer-of all-things-orderly, and Dan, who doesn’t have OCD but is seriously considering a long-term relationship with it. They went back and forth many, many times over the course of the afternoon with Steve disassembling and reassembling it with the numbers in the wrong order, only for Dan to calmly open it up in about a third of the time and reorder them properly… somehow neither of them thought it made sense to concede and just leave it alone…

A couple of folks worked their way through Iwahara’s new Quaternary Box and one or two managed to find the second compartment in Bars Box III – so I know that one’s not broken – I’m just being more incompetent than usual…

Frank had to step out at some point in the afternoon so we played another fun round of hide the Kumiki – Steve had found another bunch of old Kumiki puzzles in his collection that he thought Frank would like, so he gave us each one to hide somewhere in Frank’s house… and then challenged Frank to find them all. Frank really loves this game – in fact he’s still playing last year’s round. [Editor’s note: in the week following NPP he found the Kumiki pig that I’d hidden in his dining room last year. The man is on fire…]

At one point Ali announced that it was time for the competition and produced a copy of his new NPP burr for everyone to solve – as a competition… virtually everyone solved their copy before I finally managed to work out just how I was being stupid and what might work a little better – finally managing to assembly the little bugger – only for Ali to present me with a giant sized version and ask me to repeat the process on the larger one… Frank had just done exactly that and discovered he’d assemble them in mirrored forms… it took me almost as long to assemble the second copy – not that sharpest brush on the line… or something. ;-)

The girls had been out painting pottery and shopping up a storm (and nomming cakey!) and when they returned we started prepping for dinner (because we were all famished by that stage – NOT!) – once again it was clear that there was going to be a huge spread, but before dinner, Frank announced there’d be an awards ceremony based on some secret challenges he’d given each one of us to do with Steve during the course of the day. This took Steve a little by surprise and he hadn’t really noticed anything too weird – we each got invited to tell Steve what we’d had to get him to do and in return for our successful achievement of our challenges, Frank awarded each of us with a ceremonial NPP Challenge medal… I had to get Steve to tell me his age and get him to fist-bump me twice (not really my style, but he was very obliging during our co-solve of Oskar’s Screw Pack), Gill had to get him to dance (Hokey Pokey obviously!), someone had to get him to make an animal noise - worryingly he did that entirely of his own accord, Mike had to get him to play rock, paper, scissors and so on… we all had a lot of fun with it – and medals!

After dinner Frank divided us into two teams and we competed in a head-to-head solve of an envelope escape… we came second…

There was a bunch more banter and solving and then it all got a bit too much for some of us… Tamsin took a bit of a nap with Chiquitito but her years of being an on-call doctor kicked in when Frank gently woke her and she jumped up and was fully awake in about 3 microseconds…

Everyone headed off to their respective Airbnb’s and we headed upstairs to bed.

Next morning Frank and Jo treated us to a massive breakfast fit for a king (or three!) before we met up with the rest of the gang at Lucardo in Rawtenstall for a couple of escape rooms. Claus for Concern turned out to be a LOT more puzzly than we’d thought it would be - and Corruption was really excellent – lots of surprising elements in the room that had us absolutely buzzing.

After we’d all finished there was the obligatory comparison of finishing times across the room and bonus points – before a team photo outside the rooms for posterity…

…after a few pretty torrid weeks in the office, that was an absolutely brilliant couple of days with some of my favourite friends – Thank you Frank and Jo for another awesome weekend!