DCD 2024

A week after DCD I find myself in a little cottage on a farm in Cornwall… I’ve got a couple of crates of (mostly unsolved) puzzles and Gill is stitching a festive panel at the kitchen table, and more importantly, I have some time to scribble something about DCD - mainly so that I’ll remember the best bits...

Ali, Steve and Lily had driven across on the Friday and Frank joined them early the next morning after spending an hour and a half in an immigration queue in the middle of the night. My journey is relatively uneventful, albeit I end up stuck on the motorway for almost an hour en route to the airport as a result of an accident just up ahead… I manage to scarf a croissant and down a double espresso before getting on the plane that I was having visions of missing.

My flight arrives a bit early and I manage to find Phil in the station concourse and we wend our way to the hotel where I check in and dump most of my baggage before we head to Delft to find the monkeys, Frank, Lily and Louis for some lunch… at one point we’re having a four-way chat on messenger and the feedback from the three of them standing next to each other is something awful!

We find a suitable spot for cheese toasties and burgers and it doesn’t take long for the puzzles to cover the table… somehow we manage to actually eat our lunch and head off to Rob’s place more or less on schedule.

Even more puzzles come out to play at Rob’s and I manage to offload some copies of Ken’s Fool’s cube after a good race between Stefan and Yaccine… the little gotcha moment in the middle of the solve never fails to amuse with several folks in the audience knowing exactly what to expect and not being disappointed.

Wil has a new symmetry puzzle to torture us with… a few of the guys manage to solve it that afternoon… I am not one of the them, and indeed a week later I am still not counted among the solvers… I’ve taken a few really slow clocks for him - he spotted a UK website that sells clocks that tell you what day of the week it is (who knew?!) and I managed to get them in time to bring across for him and he seems happy with them…

Rob’s collection of wotsits comes out to tease and there’s plenty of hilarity at some of the questions, and indeed some of the answers, with some odd implements remaining entirely unidentified during the course of the evening. (For some reason there is an extended discussion of shoving a beer can up a chicken’s R’s…)

Rob orders in the traditional spread of pizzas and we feast merrily before puzzling a little more… the crowds begin thinning out and somewhere around 9 we pile into Louis’ car and an uber and head off to our 10pm escape room - the lads and Lily having done a couple of the city’s excellent escapes room that morning.

We duly sign up for the public execution but things go a little awry when Louis ends up being the star attraction and the whole thing goes Pete Tong. We do manage to free Louis (I’m sure there’s a cracking movie title in there somewhere) and then set about escaping from the prison ourselves… the rooms are excellently themed and there’s a total lack of gratuitous combination locks on everything that opens… there’s a single key to be found and used and several keypad door locks and the rest is pure puzzling… it’s a great room and we manage to get out with a few minutes to spare without getting too many nudges along the way…

Another uber and a ride in the Louis-mobile see us safely back to the hotel where I crash unceremoniously - the others spend a couple of hours shuttling between the bar, the outside area and the lobby as they get moved on as things close down… I’m happily in the land of nod while all that’s going on.

Next morning we meet for breakfast and head off to the college where I’m pleased to say there are already a large number of tables positively groaning under the weight of the puzzles looking for new homes. I dump my rucksack and my jacket in the corner and then spend a while wandering around and chatting to folks I haven’t seen for a while… that’s the best part of these get togethers.

I get rid of a few boxes of English chocolates one of my mates enjoys and we catch up on the past six months. Wil gives me a rather large lump of brass that I suspect will puzzle me for quite a while to come… I do a circuit of the tables and come across a copy of Perfect Entrance that I’d somehow contrived to miss out from Mine’s last round of puzzles and I’m chuffed to be able to stumble across a copy for sale.

Stefan has a table with copies of his stunning 3D printed versions of the Kosticks’ RDS Interlock puzzle - I pick up a copy in spite of already having one that he’d gifted back home because he’s done a very clever thing with the customised packaging - there’s a label sewn into the bag that shows the pieces and lists the various challenges - brilliantly done! [A few days later I find myself visiting James and gifting this copy to him and he’s delighted, not having seen Stefan’s stunning printing before… so I’ll need to grab another copy when Stefan comes across for MPP…]

Stefan is also giving away copies of his tiny Soma puzzles in a box… the prints are immaculate, and tiny… and I get to listen to Stefan explaining some of the intricacies of printing effectively at this scale… the bit that really stands out is Stefan using big hand gestures to describe all of the extraneous material around the tip of a 0.2mm printer nozzle and having to file down the tip so that there’s less heat mass at the tip itself, or it ruins the print! I grab a copy of both sizes and manage to use the included tweezers to pack the pieces into their boxes and seal them in place with their little dovetailed(!) lids.

Wil sells me a new box from JCC that we end up really enjoying at dinner later that day.

Later on in the day I spend a while at Jack’s table picking out a few of his latest creations that I don’t have yet, including a couple of new high level 18-piece burrs (Twinkle and Wink - we get the story behind them later in the afternoon at Jack’s lecture). Jack’s arithmetic is even worse than my own and he solidly refuses to take the right amount of money from me - thank you Jack.

Tony Fisher has a giant Golden Cube on his table - this year’s giant creation just for our amusement. Marcel and the Luxembourg contingent have a long row of tables piled high with puzzles from an early Isis puzzle still pristine in its wooden box through to a small crate full of Trevor Wood creations… it really is amazing what you can find available for sale at DCD.

Anneke Treep had a table full of crocheted tori and linked rings - part of her latest bit of research into crocheted mathematical structures - I couldn’t resist sending Gill a pic of the crocheted goodies at the puzzle gathering.

Lunch is the usual fare of soup, rolls and hotdogs… and there’s hot and cold drinks on tap all day long - you really can’t beat the value you get from the entry fee!

The afternoon lectures started with a really interesting lecture from Jack Krijnen on how he searches for interesting high level 18-piece burrs (his speciality!). He told us a lovely story about the most recent discovery coming just after he’d made up a batch of what he thought was going to be his best discovery of the year, only for it to be surpassed by Twinkle. There was an update on the World Puzzle Centre and a video of some naked puzzlers. Rob gave us his usual canter through some of the exchange puzzles with Diniar supplementing the descriptions with his insights.

After the lectures there was some more shopping and I managed to grab a few handfuls of cheap puzzles from Jack’s table to use as giveaways - I love giving new puzzlers a cop of “Build a House” where the aim is literally presented on the name card but it seems impossible to build. As per our earlier agreement, Jack let me pay sticker price for these, but then couldn’t help himself from throwing in a bunch of copies of Cruiser as well… thank you Jack, again!

The monkeys seemed to do a reasonable trade over the course of the day and hopefully the truck was a little lighter on the way back home.

With things winding down, we set about putting the hall back into the right format for school lunches and manage to move all the chairs and tables around without breaking any puzzle or indeed puzzlers in the process.

Louis lines up a table at the local Chinese restaurant for us and we duly wander down the road and take out some puzzles to play with - the alert reader may notice a theme here… Lily manages to launch a fork into Steve's drink without spilling a drop and we enjoy several rounds of the buffet (although Frank insists on having sweet and sour sauce on his banana fritters for some reason) and plenty of cold beverages before calling it a night and heading back to the hotel where we say goodbye to Louis who heads off to Eindhoven.

Back in the hotel bar there’s a nice chat about the weekend - with Frank admitting that this was just what he needed to top up his puzzling mojo again… DCD really is a great excuse for a weekend away with your puzzling mates from all around Europe.

Thanks to all of you for making it another great DCD!

Freeze 14

This may be a short blog post – but I am a MASSIVE fan of this puzzle!

I’ve been following the release of Yuu Asaka’s puzzles fairly closely since Louis gifted me a copy of Jigsaw Puzzle 29 just after IPP38… I’d enjoyed the roller coaster ride on 29, and pretty much enjoyed every single one of their designs since then… but Freeze 14 really is something else!

Eight larger frosted pieces and six small white pieces need to fit inside the simple octagonal tray… the frosted bits have some useful cut-outs and some less-useful protrusions – all of which seriously limit the ways you can put them together inside the tray – they do form a lovely snowflake-ish pattern in the tray which is very pleasing…

However, no matter how you try and combine and order the pieces, there’s never quite enough spaces for the little white bits… who knew that three little squares and three little circles would cause so much trouble?!

I end up spending quite a while experimenting with different orderings but somehow, I’m always one or more gaps short. I try and get creative, but that seems even less productive…

This process continues over the course of a couple of weeks as I dip in and out of trying to solve this puzzle… always at least one gap short and just not enough space to squeeze that final little white piece into place…

At some point I abandon all sense of orderliness and begin searching for what I can only describe as a truly chaotic solution – nobody said it needed to look like a lovely snowflake in a tray… that particular search path leads to even more frustration and sensing that my (not really-) “almost” solutions are nowhere near as good as they had been on the more orderly attempts, I abandon that search-space.

At some point, after an embarrassingly long time playing with this puzzle, I notice something interesting – it’s been there all along and I’ve just been studiously ignoring it – and it’s the key to a solution that is wonderfully elegant – making my chaotic experimentation all the more mortifying.

IMHO definitely the most pleasing A-Ha! yet from Yuu Asaka – after the initial period of experimenting and realising the obvious approach probably isn’t going to work, there are a few discoveries that unlock the path to a magnificently elegant solution.