Visiting the World Puzzle Centre

(Sorry, I can’t bring myself to spell it wrong!)

A couple of weeks ago I found myself heading down to Stansted to meet up with Peter, Ali and Louis – it turns out it’s quicker to fly to England and pick up a flight to Perugia if you happen to live in Eindhoven. We don’t find Peter until we head down to the gate and manage to solve the gate puzzle when Ryanair pull a last-minute gate-switcheroo without changing the boards down at the gate.

We head off a bit later than planned but Ryanair seem to have some spare time in their schedule and we land more or less on time… Louis’ passport sees him through in record time and the three Brits bring up the rear. We find Steve outside waiting for us – he’s come over a few days early and rented a car to fetch and carry us – nice man that he is…

The drive back to the castle is complicated a bit by the fact that the car’s satnav speaks Italian, the main motorway is shut for road works and everyone drives on the wrong side of the road. We manage to solve one of these when Ali fires up Google Maps on his phone but we still manage to miss a couple of turnoffs along the way… we end up having a wild ride through the Italian countryside but Steve gets us all safely to the castle.

We grab our bags and head indoors where we find Rox welcoming all of us. She shows us to our rooms – Steve and Louis are in the castle and Ali, Peter and I get to choose a room each in the hotel – Ali takes the twisty room, Peter the IPP Exchange room and I grab the Lego room.

We head back up to the castle where Rox has laid on a massive Italian feast for us – we navigate up to the dining room and set about enjoying a great dinner of homemade pizza and lasagne – just brilliant!

There’s a little time for puzzling, but somewhere around 1am I run out of steam and head off to my room to crash. I get a great night’s sleep and somewhere around 9am we regroup at the castle for breakfast.

After breakfast we spend some time puzzling… there’s work to be done on some polycube assemblies that form part of Jan Zoon’s massive Notre Dame – I remember seeing this one at DCD a number of years ago and seeing it up close & in bits, was way more impressive! This assembly represents about 6 month’s of Jan’s life and is made up of literally millions of little cubies all glued into unique assemblies – they in turn assemble into the building blocks that in turn build the Notre Dame… a couple of these blocks have become partially disassembled and need rebuilding… and that’s a massive job, it turns out, even if you have access to several copies of BurrTools. A few of us have a bash at it manually until Rox and Marie managed to procure a CD drive for George’s laptop – that ended up giving us access to Jan’s notes and enabled us to track down the appropriate virtual brick and rebuild it… despite that pithy(!?) description, that ends up taking us several hours!

At some point early in the afternoon the Van der Pols arrive and George and Rox take us on the official tour of the castle and the hotel… we start in Louis’ suite (apparently that’s the Apartment when he’s not in residence) and then head down into the dungeon – a great place for heavy metal chests and, of course, gold and dragons! We work our way along the basement, each taking a turn in the jail, before we reach a dead end – where there’s a tantalising bricked-up door-shaped spot in the wall heading to the basement of the hotel… (a couple of weeks later Facebook reliably informs me they’ve managed to break through and will now have a passage connecting the castle and the hotel. Huzzah!)

We head upstairs at the opposite end of the castle through the crystal room (currently in need of a new means of supporting the shelves) and then heading up the stairs past hundreds of boxes mounted in the stairwell with some truly awesome puzzles begging to be played with. (Peter obliges later on and even I join in on it.) The rooms are all lined with fabulous antique display cabinets all doing their damnedest to display the mainly wooden puzzles throughout the castle (where the humidity is pretty consistent given the depth of the castle walls which have effectively protected Panicale from invasion for centuries!) – the room we’d dined in the night before has a stupendous collection of wooden puzzle boxes in it – I think I spot an Apricot box on top of one of the cabinets – it’s probably safer up there!

At the end of the floor there’s a room crammed with some mind-blowing sequential discovery puzzles, from an Apothecary Chest through James’ old Scanavini cabinet right up to Tracey’s Mega Puzzle Mansion – the scale-model of their home in Boca – currently partially open and requiring some more serious puzzling – good thing we have Louis to help Steve.

The view from the tower on the top floor is incredible. (Note to my reader: I’m probably going to run out of superlatives at some point.) I find myself just standing there drinking it in several times over the course of the weekend.

The tour continues over at the hotel where George and Rox show us what they’re doing on the first floor to create a main suite for themselves… next to the gym and George’s new (clean) workshop which still looks pristine and must be almost ready to start receiving the collection of printers and laser cutters. Everything is set up to make this one almighty makerspace, in line with their aim of having a place where folks can come and collaborate and prototype new puzzling ideas on the spot… I’d say they’re going to achieve that in spades.

On the upper levels we run through the IPP Exchange Room – with narrow shelves around all of the walls holding (literally!) all of the IPP exchange puzzles (some were still in boxes but I think that by the time Steve and Louis left, they’re all out there!).

The Lego room has space for plenty of the wonderful kits still in their boxes, along with piles of general construction bits for folks to play… the Twisty puzzle room is jaw-dropping! Literally floor to ceiling shelves covered in every single twisty you could imagine – from the oldest ones to the very latest, and every single thing in between…

Next the plastic and electronic puzzles room is similarly jam-packed…

Down in the basement there are several rooms with map drawers and piles of boxes and some with just plain piles of boxes – in spite of the stupendous amount already out on display, there’s even more still waiting to be unpacked and displayed…

We work our way along the basement under the hotel into George’s dirty workshop – complete with direct access to the street outside for easy delivery of large quantities of lumber, or, frankly whatever takes his fancy… and up against one wall of the next room along there’s a tell-tale door-shaped arrangement of stone work in the wall begging to be attacked… (Yup: Italian artisans 1 – bricked up doorway 0).

With the tour complete, focus shifts back to getting Jan’s temple back together… Steve and I somehow manage to get the final two bricks assembled and Louis and Jan do a stellar job of assembling the temple from the various pre-prepared bricks… toward the end of the construction everyone is up in the tower watching, advising or making mischief – it is left as an exercise for the interested reader to determine which one was Steve. When we get near the top, the final towers take a couple of attempts and plenty of discussions of how common earthquakes really are in this neck of the woods (more than you might imagine, it turns out). The final bits go on and Jan looks really proud that his handiwork now has a forever home.

Rox and George treat us all to dinner at Gallo, one of several fine eateries in the town – Rox has ordered a bit of what they do best for everyone and it duly starts coming and keeps coming… the food is delicious but several of us find ourselves asking if there’s much more to come as we’re truly stuffed. It turns out there are just two more courses to go and we soldier through it… did I mention the food is fantastic?

After dinner we take the long route home, wandering around the other side of the town until we get to the base of the castle and Rox spends a while playing with the lights up in the tower and delivering various flags from around the world… much to our amusement – the kids are easily amused! There’s some more puzzling before I crash at a more sensible hour than the evening before.

Breakfast is a repeat of the day before with everyone surfacing at more or less the same time… after breakfast I resume working on Doog’s latest called Channel 13 – I’d spent some time on it the day before and made a little bit of progress, thankfully I’d managed to reset it so I gave myself another go on it in the morning… this time I got it into a position that seemed like it might not be reversible and I panicked a little and asked Doog if I’d done something silly… he laughed at me and said I probably hadn’t broken it… so I puzzled on and a short while later managed to complete the solve, and indeed reset it properly – fun puzzle!!

Ali, Steve and Louis set about completing the Mega Mansion solve after Steve and Nigel had done most of the initial work on it during a previous visit. There’s some serious heavy lifting of both the literal and figurative variety – heck there’s even some consultation of the solution notes and some backwardsing and forwardsing with Tracey before the Mansion quite literally opens up and yields the final challenges… much to Rox’s absolute delight.

There are a few personalised jigsaws and a serious construction project still to be tackled… the lads end up short-circuiting one particular bit of the solve to make it a whole lot more tractable for the next set of solvers but resetting it takes up the rest of the day and indeed some of the following(!).

While some of that’s going on I play with Perry’s latest offering that I’d missed out on in Houston and find it as delightful a solve as ever… Peter’s favourite phrase is “Perry has out Kawashima’d Kawashima” – and I find myself agreeing with that – it’s a wonderfully surprising little box that never let’s you just get into a rhythm and “know” where the next move is going to come from…

Lunch is a blur of delicious flatbread sandwiches before the puzzling resumes… and it is good.

The Millers head off to the opera with the Zoons and at a somewhat sensible hour we head off to the airport with Ali riding shotgun and providing navigational suggestions from Google – we end up retracing some of our steps from the trip out and make it to the airport in plenty of time, so we find a quiet corner, catch up on emails and enjoy a little more puzzling time.

Ryanair takes us back to Stansted a bit later than scheduled but I’m back in my car just before midnight ready for the two-hour drive home… the traffic is delightfully light and I‘m very glad I’ve had the forethought to take the Monday off work…

It really was a truly remarkable weekend – something I was reminded of when folks in the office asked me what I’d been up to over the weekend – “Been to Umbria to visit some friends who bought a castle and a hotel to house their puzzle collection” – that is never going to sound ordinary in any conversation.

Thanks to Steve for getting us organised and playing chauffeur and to Rox and George for being awesome hosts over the weekend…

I’ll be back…

Chained Key

A Keychain SD Pocket Puzzle from Waier Creations – your task is simply to remove the key which is currently trapped in the barrel of the lock – sure it’ll wiggle a little, but it ain’t going nowhere.

My first taste of Chained Key was having a bash at Dan’s copy at the last MPP – I managed to work my way through the first four or five steps relatively easily (and then promptly found myself well and truly stuck… but given what I’d seen in the first few steps, I decided that I needed a copy of my own so I duly hit up Luke’s website and ordered myself a copy…

When it arrived I expected to make quick work of the first few steps once again, and get back to where I was stuck… only to discover that I’d been a little lucky when I was playing with Dan’s copy as someone hadn’t quite reset one of the elements properly, so I’d been able to bypass something… my copy didn’t have that problem and I found myself somewhat stuck… for a few days… until Ali reminded me that I’d solved that bit somewhere else – something that put a massive smile on my face, not just because I’d been caught twice by that trick, but because I really love the solution to that bit!

Having gotten past that bit, I managed a few more steps forward before promptly getting stuck again… several more days passed before I realised I hadn’t tried something from another recent puzzle and managed to progress one more step.

By now I was pretty sure I was near the end – virtually everything that looked like it could be extracted, had been, but the key remained as immobile as ever. Several more days passed, with the odd bit of Think (c) in between other bits and pieces of puzzling until another tool is imagined, and tried, and something different happens and I find the key can now be removed…

At this stage there’s a serious array of bits and pieces and sundry tools on the desk… way more than you’d initially imagine you might come across… Luke’s done a brilliant job of curating a wonderful journey in a tiny little object that you could very easily use as a keychain. The steps are all logical and really elegant – none of them requires particular dexterity or vice-like grip from the digits – it’s all wonderfully elegant!

I love the fact that I got stopped in my tracks at least three times by this little pocket puzzle – it really made me earn the solve and each step felt like a proper little victory – not once was there a naff step that you felt wasn’t worthy of a good puzzle – this one’s all super compact goodness… don’t be tempted to brute force any of the elements – there’s a wonderfully elegant method for each and every step along the journey – definitely worth the price of admission!

 

Minima Texas

I managed to pick up a bunch of new puzzles from Tye in Houston and one of them has had me scratching my head for an inordinate amount of time: Frederic Boucher’s Minima Texas, produced by Steve Smith.  

The familiar 2*2*3 box with the odd window here and there seems to have a number of wooden blocks already inside it… which is unusual because the Minimas’ challenge is normally putting the blocks into the box… oh, and there’s a dirty great bolt sticking out of one of the sides…

The instructions ask you to retrieve the oil barrel, find your number and then reset the puzzle… hang on – there’s an oil barrel in there?!

I end up spending literally weeks doing the obvious thing, which then permits some things to move around, and you feel like this could be the start of something promising… only to come up against a very hard stop, every single time… there’s just nothing left to do, and it doesn’t feel like anything particularly major has happened yet – there certainly isn’t a serial number or a barrel of oil anywhere in sight!

Must try harder…

I repeat this process over the course of several weeks because, hey, you know, something different might happen… I check in with some of my mates who’re also working on it and find they’re having the same experience that I am… but that doesn’t really help…

At some point I’m giving myself a bit of a talking to about how bad puzzlers don’t test their assumptions (most often because they haven’t even realised they’ve made a particular assumption) and I set about testing all of my assumptions thus far…and wouldn’t you know it, I find something I “knew”, that I really didn’t…. for the first time in weeks I feel like I’m getting something out of this puzzle…

My new discovery opens up some new things to explore and I find a way to make it really useful and I start learning things about this puzzle that I’d been blissfully unaware of up until now… this little guy holds quite a few secrets!

By the time I finally manage to find my serial number and my oil barrel I feel like I know this petite little puzzle intimately, and while I might start out thinking that the rest is going to be tricky, it turns out that if you’ve put in as many hours as I have on the solve, resetting it is a piece of cake.

Definitely the most complex of the Minimas I’ve tackled so far… it’s an absolute delight!

 

Pinball Wizard

The latest sequential discovery masterpiece from MW Puzzles made an early guest appearance at MPP a while back and, even though it wasn’t quite finalised yet, it already looked stunning… I can’t really comment on how advanced the puzzling elements were as I managed to make literally zero progress on it!

When it became available on their website, I joined the throng and secured a place in the queue when the puzzles were ready. (Having already enjoyed several of their puzzles already, I had no qualms about doing this – these guys have earned their reputation for delivering on their promises!)

A few weeks later there was an email, an invoice, some PayPal was paid and then the cutest little pinball machine in the world duly arrived in an incredibly well-packaged parcel.

How can you not love a puzzle whose instructions literally start with “Play Pinball”!?

The next two steps are (only) slightly more pedestrian (“Find your unique Issue Number” and “Win the Trophy”) before the fourth task requires you to “Have Fun!”… so you kinda have to!

The attention to detail is excellent – this diminutive machine has a working plunger for launching the balls, bumpers, working flippers (well, it had to, didn’t it?), some obstacles and scoring holes and of course the inevitable drain… the backboard has a numeric display with an issue # / 350 – currently displaying 000 – but that can’t be right…

Looking around the machine, there are a few odd holes and strange-looking thingamabobs, but prodding them and twisting them doesn’t seem to do anything…

In shipping configuration there’s a big old chunk of cork jammed into a hole on the side, removing that frees your ball bearing, ready to play…

Dropping the ball into the chute and releasing the plunger sends the ball into play and the flippers are pretty responsive and soon enough you can launch the ball around the table to more or less any part that suits your fancy… Step 1 achieved.

While just playing pinball is fun, there’s clearly a lot more to this mechanical marvel, so I set about exploring some of the less obvious “features” – I find some things far more interesting than others and begin finding some tools. At one point I’m just tootling around when a tool quite literally launches itself into the air – this little guy is full of surprises it turns out!

There’s some lovely sequential stuff in the guts of the solve where pathways open up as you progress and you find new things to explore… several times I found myself getting stuck on an element and literally imagining a breakthrough several days later only to find that at least part of what I’d dreamt up turned out to be useful and provide some forward progress…

The final stage of this puzzle tortured me for several days – like any good puzzler I kept trying the same things over and over again expecting a different outcome…”knowing” what I needed to do… only to realise about a week later that one of my assumptions was literally as wrong as it could be!

Matthew clearly understands puzzlers, and in particular, he understands exactly how to lead them right up the garden path and into a blind alley! I’d love to see the mechanics inside this little guy because there are so many little surprising interactions that don’t always seem possible… right from that very first little surprise.

This one looks stunning and it’s a cracking sequential discovery puzzle to boot! What’s not to love?

….and you get to play as much pinball as you want!