keebox

I’m often late to the party and after seeing a few of my mates enjoying the solve on the keebox puzzles, I decided I should treat myself to a set of the Blue, Orange and Yellow puzzle boxes.

Etsy duly provided and I was massively impressed with the design of not only the puzzles, but also the packaging, with each of the boxes having custom inserts to cushion the puzzle from the hardships of the outside world – someone has gone to a lot of trouble to customise packaging to the individual puzzles – I appreciate that!

The three provide differing levels of challenge from “easy-peasy” for the Blue, through “a real challenge” and on to “my brain hurts” for the Yellow.

The Blue has a few knobs on the sides – a large knob on the top and a coloured side panel that seems to flap around a little when it’s inspected. You’ll probably start twiddling and fiddling with things and with a bit of luck you’ll find something interesting to explore and stuff will no doubt being to happen… and if you’re anything like me you’re going to find some stuff happening when you least expect it and you’re going to be crawling around on the floor picking up bits and pieces…

Blue provides a relatively short solve without too many diversions – there are one or two delightful little uses for some tools that’ll bring a smile to even the most jaded of solvers – the blue k-token is literally delivered on a platter. I’m not sure I’d call it “easy peasy” but it does provide an introduction to the series and shows you some of what’s to come…

Orange comes with a set of sliders with weird symbols on one side, three knobs on top and another on one side, another of those coloured plates that might do something at some point and a maze inscribed on the back.

Fiddling and twiddling is always a great place to start and soon enough you’ll find yourself with a few tool-shaped objects as a reward for your exploits… somewhere along the way you’ll spot a little ball bearing and with the right encouragement you can even get it into a partially hidden maze… some of those symbols make an appearance and at the right time your can use those to unlock another secret…

There’s a lot to be done on this one – certainly a lot more than on the Blue – but the flow is nice and logical and if you’re stick it’s always worth pausing and considering what you’ve found and what you’ve used… and sometimes more interestingly what you haven’t used… the visual clues are more important on this one than on the Blue – and they all lead you nicely to the spot where you can release the orange k-token.

Yellow looks a bit more intimidating: there appears to be a combination lock built into one side, several sliders and knobs, another of those coloured panels that seems less-well-attached and a complex set of hole patterns on the base… it threatens to hurt your brain – and it will certainly make those little grey cells sweat a little.

Yellow is part physical puzzle, part mental challenge and part pattern recognition – there are several physical surprises (a couple of times I found myself thinking “I wasn’t expecting THAT!” when something interesting happened.

As with the others, there’s a good flow to the solve, with everything following a neat solution path, so if something doesn’t make sense yet or if you find yourself having to guess, you haven’t found everything you’re supposed to have, yet. There are some really excellent little clues along the way – I loved the re-use of some of the elements to provide different clues – that was clever!

…and this time the yellow k-token seems to fall into your lap when you’re done, leaving you wondering where the heck it came from… perhaps that’s just me!

It’s a great series of puzzles for a pretty decent price – I’ve already raved about the design and the packaging, but their hints and reset instructions are worth a shout out as well, providing you with a series of gradual hints for each section of the solve, starting out with a nudge toward where you should be paying attention, via a number of further hints, to a blow-blow-walk-through for each step... a lot of thought and care has gone into these puzzles! 

Tortoise Protocol

Juno’s sequential discovery puzzles are legendary! Latterly they’ve tended to come along pretty much annually. They’re hotly anticipated and tend to sell out in minutes – this year’s release of Tortoise Protocol didn’t disappoint on that front – it was literally gone in minutes with some folks probably ruing their decision to enable two-factor authentication on their purchases.

My copy made the trip over to the UK in great time and I was happily puzzling the following weekend. Tortoise Protocol is a chunky puzzle – it’s definitely more than a handful and all of the requisite tortoise-y bits are where you’d expect them to be. The shell seems to have a bit of wiggle relative to the body, so at some point we’re going to expect to be able to open things up… but at the start, we just have a few appendages to fiddle with to try and make some progress.

There are some obvious things to get the tortoise to do and some of them appear to open the doors to even more things, so we decide this must be progress and we forge on until we find ourself with fewer appendages and a whole new world opening up to us.

At this point (and it’s not really a spoiler!) you find yourself with all of the stuff you’ve done up until now out on display and easily accessible and another half of the story apparently totally locked up… sure there’s a lot of things to investigate and poke about with, just nothing actually seems to give you any progress at all…

I spent quite a while at this point in the solve pondering my life choices and wondering where the heck my inspiration would come from… there was obviously still a pile of things to do – just no apparent way in to start things off… this particular brick wall kept me at bay for ages.

Eventually I stumbled across the key to defeating my current nemesis that started a wonderful romp of a solve through the rest of the puzzle. There’s a wonderfully whimsical series of linked challenges to amuse the solver, with each giving just enough up to guide you through to the next challenge, be that a peek of something useful, or the discovery of a new tool. Given this is Juno, it’s worth keeping an open mind about things you come across – most things are tools in the right hands!

No tortoises harmed in this blog post

 

There are some fun steps along the way, and I found myself wondering how some things worked and where the heck some tools had magically appeared from.

There is a very clear end goal – you’ll know when you’ve found it!

And the best part? Resetting is wonderfully non-trivial – if you did miss anything along the way, you’ll be forced to work it out in order to reset everything… and there was one little “feature” I thought I hadn’t used until almost the very end of the reset – and I smiled to myself when I twigged why it was there – everything is there for a reason!

Juno’s sequential discovery fans are going to love this one and I suspect that if it ends up getting entered into any puzzle design competitions it’s going to give the other entries a damn good run for their money!

Another epic sequential discovery puzzle from one of the masters of the art!

 

Midas Touch Puzzlebox, aka Stickman #38

I was super chuffed when I got the first email from Robert Yarger announcing his 38^th numbered puzzlebox. Midas Touch came about as a result of the clamour of requests over the years for “something similar” to his iconic Gordian Knot puzzlebox, and given that Midas was Gordian’s son in Greek mythology, it seems fitting.

Visually, Midas Touch has a very strong resemblance to Gordian Knot – there’s a dizzying patchwork of bits and pieces wrapped around a cube, although Midas Touch is significantly larger than Gordian Knot… oh and there’s a huge trapped Stickman coin inviting you to remove it from the outer shell of Midas Touch.

My copy arrived a couple of days before MPP and in spite of having a couple of plays with it, I felt like I’d made almost no progress – there were some bits and pieces that could be successively manipulated in the outer shell and with some careful scrutiny, a bit of experimentation I managed to string a few useful things together until I hit a total brick wall…

A few folks had a bash at it at MPP and made similar amounts of progress until the already well-documented sabotage by a Welsh puzzler which brought play to a halt. A couple of days later I’d decided how best to repair it, broke out the glue and then spent a while holding things firmly in place for the glue to set.

Next day I was happy with my repair, but still not really able to make much progress beyond the series of steps I’d discovered the week before. I spent quite a while trying similar things and making no progress whatsoever… and it required some serious exploration before I managed to make that next bit of progress, but it was pretty darn mind-blowing. I’d decided how this box was going to be solved, and how it would probably end up opening, and I was totally wrong.

This is a classic Stickman gotcha! Rob makes you think you understand things and then you realise he’s parked you in a blind alley and you’ve been in there for hours on your own enjoying making absolutely no progress!

That first big “A-Ha!” was massive for me and seriously ramped up my expectation of this puzzlebox on the one hand, but on the other it gave me a whole new way to think about things… and that turned out to be quite important!

The attention definitely shifts gear and these new aspects are fun to explore. You’re in proper classic puzzlebox territory although a lot of the time it’s really hard to figure out what could be impeding your progress, and how the heck you get around whatever that is – the interplay between the outer shell and the hidden innards is really clever and kept me guessing for ages.

There’s a wonderful sense of triumph when you finally open a drawer and get into the box, although the elation doesn’t last when you remember that Rob’s told you there are two internal drawers to discover and open…

The last act is another neat little challenge providing just enough motivation without making you feel like you’ve had to head right back to school again.

Getting everything fully opened is a great reward for the not inconsiderable effort required to solve it – and if you’re anything like me, that challenge is a long way from over because reassembly is another significant challenge – unless you’ve taken lots to notes you’re definitely going to find yourself going backwards and forwards a few times as you come to realise you’ve backed yourself into a corner you can’t get out of.

Midas Touch is definitely a worthy extension to this royal family of challenges.

Another wonderfully bonkers puzzlebox from the Stickmeister himself.

MPP LCIIIX

We’ve been planning this one for months! Anne and Nick were going to be around for a business trip and Dick was going to be visiting Wimbledon and we’d managed to find a weekend in the middle of all that,that worked for Dick and Nick – so we settled on the date and told the universe about it… Dave decided it would be fun to come over for a few days and join us and then George and Esther got in touch and said they were considering stopping in on the way to Bridges... and pretty soon we had a major US contingent coming along to MPP.

All of the carefully laid logistical plans then got tossed out of the window when some of the guys got hit by train delays on their way to Barnt Green – I grabbed George, Esther and Dave from the station and dropped them at their hotel until Nick’s train got in and then we collected everyone and brought them to the house. Frank and Jo arrived from up north soon after. It was wonderfully hot afternoon so we made sure the drinks were cold and the puzzles plentiful.

I headed off to the airport to collect the Dutch contingent ensuring we had achieved a critical mass of puzzlers by the Friday evening… this was a great start to a puzzling weekend. I braaied far too much meat and we feasted outdoors as the heat began to recede just a little.

Wil presented me with my copy of his new puzzle and swore me to much secrecy, so I won’t mention it(!).  We chatted and puzzled for a few hours before I ran the Dutch contingent down to their Airbnb and dropped most of the Americans at their hotel… before I crashed.

Next morning we changed up the schedule so I could collect Dick from the station before all of the planned logistics sprang into gear: I collected the Dutch puzzlers and we headed to the hall to open things up… Chris was already there so he and Louis and Rob ended up doing most of the hard labour while I sorted out the drinks and refreshments. Somewhere around ten o’clock half the London gang arrived at more or less the same time as Gill and Frank dropped off the Americans. The ranks swelled steadily and the puzzling proper kicked in.

I had some minor success at trying to get rid of some surplus puzzles but in the end most of them would end up coming home with me again… I’m going to need to find a sneaky way to get rid of them… perhaps I’ll run a competition or something.

Dick had made up a large bunch of souvenir gifts and made a point of talking to every puzzler present and giving them a souvenir of the event… when my turn came he also shoved a thumb drive in my hand with his complete compendium of over 21,000 wire puzzles – no doubt significantly adding to the number of disentanglements I can’t solve. :-) Thanks Dick!

Nick had also come prepared with a neatly packaged souvenir gift – and even gone to the trouble of branding it with his own take on bad Roman numerals – so not only did you need to make a symmetric shape, you also had to work out how his numerals could give you the right MPP number – nice touch, Nick!

While I’m on the subject of giveaways, George had printed and brought along a huge pile of Stewart Coffin Meteoroids (STC 100-A) – and he ended up with a steady queue of folks chatting about that and his other new creations over the course of the day.

I’d taken along my copy of Peter’s No Way Box and several groups of puzzlers took turns having a go at it… they seemed to make some progress, but I’m not sure anyone actually solved it.

Steve and Ali did some light trade over the course of the day supplying various puzzlers with bits of brass they needed.

We badly mis-timed lunch and missed out on pig rolls that had already sold out just after noon – had I mentioned the weather was brilliant and the village was buzzing? I settled for a samosa and a sack of crisps which did me well alongside all of the cakes and biscuits I scoffed all day long… Peter’s Pan provided a number of kebabs for the more health-conscious puzzlers among us.

A few of us had taken along our copies of ‘The Mother of All Weekends Box’ for folks to play with and they all performed flawlessly, except for one of them… one of my mates definitely seems to have problems making puzzle boxes! (Names have been withheld to protect Steve’s reputation.)

Wil had brought along a case-full of puzzles either for sale or to give away and between him and Louis their carry-on was around 11kg lighter on the trip home. Wil helped himself to a couple of my give aways and managed to find a more elegant solution to Theo and Symen’s Sand Box than I’d found – he’s a pretty damn good solver as well as an ace designer.

Chris had thoughtfully brought along a set of Andrew Crowell’s ball-bearing-i-fied puzzles and a 3D printed set of Greg’s NOS Burrs… for some reason people thought it would be funny to dismantle them all and leave them in a pile on the table… I was somewhat relieved they didn’t appear to have enough time to repeat that on my set of recently assembled Benno burrs!

One of the big hits of this MPP was Doog’s Double Trouble box that Steve Canfield – he of Boxes and Booze fame – had sent over with Nick – Steve had decided that Double Trouble deserved to go on a bit of a world tour, and since Nick was heading to MPP, this would make a good jumping off point for an international leg. Several knots of puzzlers spent a while huddled around Double Trouble at a time and then duly added their names to the list of solvers safely locked inside. I had a great time when my turn came – the mechanisms are intriguing, and all totally fair and honest – there’s a lovely journey to the solution, with each step politely clued to avoid having to guess at any stage. Doog’s put a lot of thought, and just enough clueing into the puzzles – while he freely admits to borrowing one little element, the rest are all pure Doog – some elements may look a little rustic, but the precision in the mechanisms is jaw-dropping… and the main “A-Ha!” when you realise what the main mechanism is, is just brilliant. Kudos to Doog, and thanks to Steve for sending a 1/1 puzzle on a world tour so a whole bunch of other puzzlers can enjoy it!

It was nice to meet Robin who prefers his puzzles math-y – he seemed to be getting on like a house-on-fire with George and hopefully he managed to spend some time with Dick as well. Robin had brought along a few of his own designs and took a fair amount of joy from seeing some us struggling with them – and yeah, I struggled more than most!

There were a few of Juno’s Tortoises around and by the end of the day most folks who didn’t have their own copy had been able to have a bash at one – unlike that time when we had a whole bunch of koalas together, we didn’t run a photoshoot with tortoises doing naughty things to one another – ‘cos that would be wrong!  

We must have had around 20-odd folks there and it felt like a great MPP.

Somewhere around 5:30 we tidied up, piled everyone into cars and headed back up to chez Walker for the traditional after-MPP-party. The heat meant the outdoor spaces were very popular and everyone ended up either chatting or puzzling until the fish suppers / leftovers were served for dinner. (I told you I’d braaied way too much meat the night before so about half of us ended up choosing to have braai leftovers rather than fish and chips – only I didn’t tell them what the leftovers were as I knew there wouldn’t be enough if everyone wanted leftovers!)

Somewhere around 10pm most folks headed back home and we dropped folks back at their Airbnb and hotels… tidied up a bit and then crashed – awesome day!

Next morning we ate breakfast and then collected the puzzlers who were still around – George and Esther were heading off to Eindhoven a bit earlier than the rest of the Dutch contingent so they headed off to the airport.

I got to spend some quality time puzzling – off on my own in a darkened corner with just Wil watching me surreptitiously while he solved puzzle after puzzle. I made enough progress that I didn’t think I’d wasted my time, but I did hit a pretty big brick wall and decided I should put it aside for now.

Lunch was a fabulous DIY affair with plenty of happy puzzlers.

After lunch Nick and I rounded up the Dutch contingent and dropped them at the airport and then collected Anne from the train station next door fresh from her business trip to Cornwall. Once Anne had solved the ticket barrier puzzle (new variant – not the Oliver Soos Disentanglement) we headed home for a relaxed afternoon’s chatting, with a side of puzzles.

That evening Nick and Dave took us all out to dinner at our local pub for a hearty meal before a few more hours chatting at home… I dropped Dave back at the hotel and he headed off to London the next morning while the four of us had breakfast at Toast – my current favourite breakfast joint.

From there we headed off to Broadway Tower for a bit of a wander around, timing our visit to the nuclear bunker impeccably to miss the passing thundershower… we drove down the hill to the village intending to wander around the village in search of afternoon tea, only to be trapped in the carpark by the mother of all showers… and after sitting there for a while we decided we’d just head off home where the hounds were happy to see us!

We grabbed a pizza at a new joint in the village before Nick and I ended up playing through the new Mystery Agency adventure in a box: The Man from Sector Six – it had only arrived a couple of days earlier and it was great fun getting to play through it with Nick – overall we did reasonably well, although we didn’t actually start a timer on it, preferring to just enjoy the puzzling. That said, I didn’t go to bed too late!

Next morning after I headed off to work, Nick and Anne headed London-ward for a final day’s exploring before they headed back to the west coast…

Most MPP weekends are pretty brilliant, but this one’s probably going to stand out even more because of all the friends who joined us and spent a while visiting – thank you all!

Something new from Two Brass Monkeys

This won’t be a long blog post, but hopefully it will be useful, if only to the small group of thoroughly masochistic puzzlers out there…

Ali and Steve have a new hexagonal stick puzzle out – as you’d expect it’s made with plenty of brass and weighs a fair bit… it resulted from their somewhat exhaustive analysis for their Joy of Hex project when they noticed that 12 copies of one particular piece would build neatly into a standard Hectix cluster.

The downside was that it would spontaneously fall apart if not supported well in a number of different planes… which doesn’t bode well for a puzzle design…

However, the Monkeys aren’t easily cowed by mere gravity and analysed further to discover that if the pieces are combined into sets of handed pairs (two this-way and four that-), the resultant assembly is not only stable under standard Earth gravity, but is an absolute pig to assemble using the usual number of hands a solo puzzler can provide.

Thus was born the Tricky Hand Job – if you like your puzzles to be infuriating, this one’s for you! Get them while they’re still warm.

…and as a final bonus, it will fly apart with a gentle spin of the assembly on a table – a fantastic way to wipe the smile off any smug puzzler who’s just solved their copy – NOT that I’d ever encourage such dastardly behaviour! 

 

Box 2 – Ice Bucket

Phil Wigfield loves using his old school metal-working skills to amuse and perplex. His second “box” is a riff on Rocky Chiaro’s Ice Bucket which Phil’s described as a nod to the original with a bit of a modern twist… we’re told there’s a stash area(!) and some ice cubes to retrieve. (I’m sure they weren’t just put in there to confuse puzzlers listening for the slightest of clues as to what’s going on inside this little fortress!)

There are some basic visual similarities to Rocky’s original, but this one stands taller and has Phil’s stamp across the top of the lid… in spite of Phil’s warning on his information cards that the puzzles are made by hand and you should expect some machining marks, mine looks incredibly tidy.

At the start of the solve the lid spins fairly freely and you can definitely hear little bits of metal clanking around inside there, although they don’t seem to be serving much mechanical purpose.

Playing around a bit and I find the lid starts behaving a little less predictably – every now and them it’ll stop turning freely and a little back-tracking allows it to free up once again, but that’s about it.

There is something else you can do, and I thought I was onto something until something rather terrifying happened, so my better judgement persuaded me to leave that avenue alone… and I think it was a wise move.

A little more serious inspection identified something potentially useful, which in turn led a friend to send me a bit of a warning which helped rather a lot… the lid was duly removed and the littlest brass ice cubes sprayed all across my desk…

Once the Ice Bucket was opened, it took me quite a bit of Think(c)ing to work out what the heck was going on in there, and even longer to work out how I’d managed to over-complicate things… Phil's designed an elegant challenge that gives the aspirant solver plenty of potential blind alleys to explore and lose themselves in for hours… and I suspect he might get a bit of a kick out of that…

Nice one Phil – that kept me out for quite a while and then confused me long after I’d opened it!

Keyring 2

Visually there are some similarities between the first and second Keyring puzzles from MW Puzzles – they’re both around the same size with a steel tube and a brass ring around them… the first keyring challenged you to remove the trapped key, whereas thing one asks you (politely) to remove the ring - that’s the brass ring, not the split ring as one of my mates suggested cheekily. (The instructions also request no banging…)

There’s one of MW Puzzles’ customary tokens attached to the split ring and it’s not hard to imagine attaching your keys to said split ring and using this as a functional key ring… should anyone need any encouraging to buy a copy.

At the start of the solve the brass ring moves freely on the steel tube, but is stopped at one end by a large hex screw that refuses to budge and in the centre by a pin securing the split ring… beyond that there’s another steel pin that spins happily but won’t budge… at least there’s a potential path to freedom, right?!

At this point there is literally only one thing even vaguely feasible, and doing that yields a couple of potential tools, but not a strong clue for where to go next…

I found something I thought should be useful (I was pretty sure it would be useful in fact!) but then I discovered that exercising that tool didn’t really do much of use… sure I could see things changing, they just didn’t seem to be opening up anything useful for me…

…and here I stuck for a few weeks, picking it up and doing the same things over and over again, sometimes with more force than strictly necessary – always with the same outcome – no further progress…

…until I asked myself an important question, and that unlocked things for me, figuratively and literally.

A great little pocket puzzle… and (unusually) they’re still available as I write this. 

Postscript - it turns out I hadn't actually solved it! I got chatting to Peter about the solve and discovered we'd both opened it different ways and when I tested that with ace-solver-Ali, he told me our "solutions" weren't nearly elegant enough - only he was far more polite than that! So when I got home I fished out my copy and had another go... I tried all the same stuff again and got nowhere, then I had a little Think(c) before I tried something else and BINGO! Now I know I've solved it properly - that is an excellent puzzle!! I'm a very big fan of this one now that I've solved it properly! (Sorry I didn't get it right the first time, Matthew!) 

Doog’s Mother of All Weekends*

(* that was Doog's name for our Whatsapp group... in hindsight, it seems appropriate! Otherwise it was going to be Alpine Puzzle Party 1... in the hopes that there might be more of them.) 

A little while back Doog reached out and asked if I’d be interested in assembling an MPP crew to spend a weekend puzzling in the Alps. He’d shared some pics of the ski slope running past his garden in winter and the stunning scenery in summer and it all looked jolly idyllic. He’d suggested a couple of months when the place wouldn’t be totally mobbed with skiers, mountain bikers or runners and we managed to find a weekend that would suit a bunch of us and Doog and Laura… so we fixed the date, booked some hotel rooms and a rental car and all met up at Geneva Airport last Friday.

Louis had volunteered to be chief driver (since he was used to driving on the wrong side of the road!) and we met up in the coffee shop at Arrivals while the delayed flight from Luton brought Steve and Ali and Rich and Dan. We claimed our people-carrier and headed for the hills with Steve navigating up front and the rest of us asking if we were there yet.

We checked in at the Rocky Pop Hotel and lurked in the lobby until Doog arrived for dinner with us. Quick introductions for those who didn’t already know Doog before we settled down for dinner and some puzzling. Doog had brought along a couple of his boxes, including a couple of copies of the box we’d be making over the weekend – Yes, Doog had offered us all a free puzzle-box-making workshop over the weekend – as if we needed any encouragement whatsoever!

The dinner was excellent – their Classic Burgers were indeed classic and dessert didn’t disappoint! There weren’t any complaints about the beer either, come to think of it.

Those sample boxes both managed to beat me and over the course of the evening a few of the guys managed to open them and encouraged the rest of us to try a suitable strategy… Doog left us at a pretty sensible hour after we’d made plans to grab some picnic food from the supermarket and meet him at the gondola station at the base of the village hill.

We gathered for breakfast and selected the sunken seating area so that we could enjoy the view of the surrounding mountains… that, and we could all amuse one another at how we got in and out of the pit – some of us slightly less elegantly than others… at least there was video evidence of some of them!

After brekkie we did a few laps of the local supermarket collecting bits and bobs for our picnic lunch – pretty much all opting for a DIY feast rather than the somewhat simpler pre-packed sandwiches. We met up with Doog over at the carpark and got some day trip tickets up (and down) the hill. The views of the surrounding mountains on the way up were brilliant and luckily, we didn’t have anyone who wasn’t a fan of heights.

At the top of the hill we admired the view a bit before Doog marched us up to the local hostelry in the saddle – we pushed a couple of tables together and hauled out the puzzles after slathering on some factor fifty – the sun was already pretty warm on top of the hill just after 10 o’clock… it was going to get a lot warmer! We ordered a few rounds of drinks and some sunshades, both of which went down well!

I’d taken a couple of Perry McDaniels’ boxes for Doog to try and he spent a while playing with a few Bonbons before moving on to something even better. I spent an absolute age trying to solve a new Dovetail Bar puzzle from Rich – something that Ali appeared to have solved in mere minutes…. 

I made heavy weather of the early part of the solve and managed to speed up a bit on the latter sections, albeit by now Rich was beginning to nudge me in the right direction having taken pity on my feeble solving skills. There was plenty of encouragement for him to make it more widely available, potentially with a couple of little helpful additions.

The scenery from our lookout was simply stunning – the mountains surrounding Mont Blanc to our right still shrouded in snow with an occasional paraglider circling round the peaks – down to the lush green valley on our left and literally mountains wherever you looked… it was hard not to feel exceptionally privileged playing with puzzles up here.

Louis and Doog end up swapping stories about their trips up Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains – each identifying where the other is describing a particular incident on the mountain… Around lunchtime we decamp from the hostelry to the top of an adjoining ski lift in search of a tiny bit of shade – have I mentioned it’s HOT!? We break out the picnic stuff and everyone enjoys making a sandwich or three from the fresh baguettes, fromage et jambon… along with several other assorted snacks – we don’t stand a hope in heck of finishing all the food we’ve brought!

We take a couple of group pics on and around the ski-lift before wandering back towards the gondola for the ride down – spoilt by another stunning round of glorious vistas. We load up the people carrier and follow Doog up the road at the end of the village to his place where Laura welcomes us warmly. Doog rigs up a sunshade over a pair of picnic tables in the garden and we start unloading puzzles onto the tables and drinks into the fridge – puzzling is very thirsty work after all! 

 

There follows an hour or two of puzzling – some of us foolishly trying to solve some of Doog’s one-off boxes with names like The Impossible Box – with the throwaway comment that nobody’s every solved that one. A few more folks have a play with Rich’s new Dovetail Bar and I feel slightly less bad about my slow solve…

Around the middle of the afternoon Doog gathers us all around the picnic table and we dial up Nick on t’internet for the beginning on our box-making workshop. Doog gives us the overview of what we’re going to be doing and dishes out the guts of the boxes that he’s already prepped for us. We spend a while sanding down the outside and making it pretty, before slicing off the top and neatening the joints. We prep a few bits of the innards and stick a key piece in place, all the while checking that the next few steps are all going to be properly aligned… it’s very obvious from the instructions and words of advice that Doog imparts, that he’s done this many times before and know what pitfalls to keep an eye out for – it’s clear he wants us all to have a properly functioning puzzle at the end of this! We managed to keep Nick in the loop, although his kit’s been a little further progressed as Doog knew he wouldn’t have access to his table saw. We end up with some partially assembled and neatly oiled boxes ready to be put aside for their glue to dry… until the morrow… so we bid goodbye to Nick, and Doog fires up the barby.   

There is a chunk more puzzling, The Impossible Box retains its record and there is a lot more snacking… with several cheese board and bread and crackers making their appearance (and disappearance!). The sun goes down behind the ridge right on cue, the sunshade comes down and we spread ourselves out a bit more across the two tables… Doog does a superb job on the barby and there’s a veritable feast of kebabs and local sausages with several salads and piles of tatties, all washed down with plenty of cold bevvies… 

We end up chatting quite late into the night before Louis drives the bus back down the hill to our hotel on the other side of the village. We're surprised to find the bar deserted and half-closed but we manage to order a round of drinks before we get moved on to the lobby so they can clean up and close for the night – it’s a hardship! I head off and duly crash, exhausted from a long day in the sunshine and fresh air… I don’t think I’ve done this much puzzling outdoors in a very long time! And it is good!

Next morning we start out at a similar time and head straight up to Doog’s where he’s been up for ages and has everything set out waiting for us… there are more of Doog’s special boxes to play with and we’re plied with coffee and snacks yet again….

The weather isn’t quite so good on the Sunday, so Doog’s planned a couple of activities around the house, including an escape room game he’s quite keen for us to try in smaller teams, so we split up with one team heading indoors for the main event while we remain outdoors and tackle Doog’s escape room in a toolbox – another game he’s concocted to amuse the crews on his yachts.

 We start out with a locked toolbox, a petty cash tin locked to the picnic table and a clock to time our progress – albeit it doesn’t seem particularly active. The game is a wonderful romp of discoveries with Doog’s wit merrily laced through them all – I loved the cassette tape marked “Blanc” on both sides given where we were. We go deeper and deeper into the toolbox, via Dolly Parton’s greatest hits until we finally unlock the key to our escape…

With the toolbox escape dispatched, Louis turns his attention to The Impossible Box and duly manages to open it, understand it, and cook it…. We all pile in and sign the (formerly empty) solvers’ log before resetting it and not letting on that we’ve solved it… (everyone agrees that watching someone solve a puzzle is as good as solving it yourself, right?!).

The other crew finishes their quest and after a short period to reset, caffeinate and snack, the B team head up to the kitchen table for our go on the main event… which starts out with a modest looking box to attack, but before long there are piles of bits and bobs around the kitchen table and we’re trying to keep track of what we haven’t used yet… because they’re bound to be used for something, right?! This one ends up taking us quite a bit longer than the other team, although in our defence we had Rich sitting there observing and offering words of advice which we’re sure weren’t aimed at throwing us off the scent… this time we end up having a few “A-Ha!” moments that are immediately followed by a “What? Seriously?!” moment – Doog’s commitment to his craft truly knows no bounds… and we’re delighted when we finally finish this adventure and write our names on the log of solvers with a fairly decent time, in spite of Rich’s “help”!

In between all this Doog offers us a couple of workshop tours… for two people at a time – because that’s literally all that will fit into his well-insulated 2m*2m shed. Rich and I enjoy the tour of what must be the tidiest and most well engineered workshop around. Designed to work like a galley kitchen, Doog can literally stand in the centre and reach anything he needs without moving… there’s space for all his tools, partial projects and wood waiting to be turned into projects. The spaces between his steel cabinets have been filled with custom drawers sized to perfectly hold his standard wood sizes… and the benchtops are pristine – there’s no dust anywhere. Doog likes a clean shop. We end up chatting for about an hour about how he thinks about his processes, how he designed the space and what he’s considering next… for a bloke with that much talent and ingenuity, he is a wonderfully down-to-earth guy with lashings of humility – he still comes across as being surprised there are folks out there prepared to pay for his boxes and fund his passion and his side-hustle.  

Lunch is another veritable feast with some more gentle puzzling until Nick o’clock. Foul weather (gentle rain!) has driven us indoors so the afternoon’s build session takes place at Doog’s kitchen table. Nick joins us for the next session of fettling and glueing with Doog offering plenty advice and guiding us all through the process of epoxying some key goodies firmly in place – I’m proud of my assembly with virtually no excess glue to be seen while some of my compatriots find themselves mopping up globs of the stuff rather than waiting until it had dried and cutting it off. Nick suffers a bit of an epoxy failure when his fails to set but he promises to try again with a new batch. By the end of the session we’re all merrily locking and unlocking our rather handsome boxes, with even Steve’s box functioning properly… unlike some other box workshops we’ve attended recently. We even manage to get a group pic with all of us and our boxes, although Nick is partially hidden behind a box. 

We tidy up the kitchen and Doog sets about rustling up dinner for the masses – he’s been talking up his tartiflette all day and a couple of us end up chewing the fat while we watch Doog cook dinner – Doog’s cooking is as meticulous as his puzzle-making and the kitchen remains spotless all the way through the process – he’s my kind of cook!

The puzzlers assemble for the main event and it is every bit as good as Doog’s made out – and there is plenty… when we all can’t eat any more we switch to chatting and a bit more puzzling. Dan’s picked up The Impossible Box and at one point he gets wildly animated and rushes out of the room, and about a minute later there’s a loud “You bastards!” from the room next door… he’s just gone to add his name to the solvers log and found it’s no longer the blank sheet he was expecting. There are some good laughs when we tell him (and Doog) what had transpired earlier on in the day… Dan remains slightly gutted.

We say our goodbyes (and THANK YOUS) and Louis takes us safely back to the hotel where we pretty much all head off to bed – it’s been a long couple of days and some of us aren’t used to all that sunshine and fresh air!

Next morning is an early start for some breakfast before heading back out of the valley and on to Geneva where a traffic jam, temporarily being unaware of our location while filling the van up with diesel, and then navigating around the car rental return conspired to try and get me to miss my flight – in the end I made it and on the plus side, I didn’t spend much time queuing for boarding!

Doog and Laura were amazing hosts to our gang of six MPPers who ended up coming to visit a bit sooner than they might have thought. It was a privilege to spend time in Doog’s part of the world and get to know him a bit better and he went way above and beyond to make sure we all ended up with a puzzle box that we’d contributed to (even if he’d done all the hard work!). Thank you both for an unforgettable weekend among some literally jaw-dropping scenery – I hope we can do that again sometime! (...and there's always a bed for you guys in Barnt Green.) 

 

MPP LCIIIIX

 

Once again there’s no one staying over for the weekend so my MPP weekend consists just of MPP itself. I head down to the hall via the shops to pick up some soft drinks and fresh milk with the rest of the gubbins already loaded up. Chris arrives while I’m still unpacking stuff from the boot and he immediately launches into setup mode, pulling out tables and spreading them around the hall before scattering the chairs around some of them.

It doesn’t take long for the monkeys to arrive with Michael and Lily in tow. Dan, Shane & Dale and Kevin & Kyle and Mike swell the ranks and Amy & Tamsin improve our diversity score a little.

I’ve taken my latest Karakuri Creations along and they generate a pretty solid level of interest throughout  the day with the steady progression really enjoying the Microscope and XY Mini, with fewer folks solving Shachihoko, which, in fairness, is not an easy solve!

Phil is distributing copies of his latest handiwork – Box 2 is a riff on Rocky’s Ice Bucket with a Wigfield twist. [I don’t get to spend any time on it at MPP, but do get some puzzling time the following evening and it has me thoroughly puzzled at this stage – there’s something obvious to do, but that doesn’t result in much happening at all… and in fact the couple of discoveries I made after that left me even more perplexed! At this stage I can however report that it’s beautifully made!]

Rich shoves a couple of puzzles in my paws – Basket Burr is an innocent-looking semi-caged burr reminiscent of Akaki’s Baskets and Dovetail Bar is a fiendish little pocket puzzle begging you to separate two pieces joined by a dovetail and held in place by some pixies between a couple of screws…. I find myself managing to separate the pieces the following evening only to find myself utterly perplexed as to why they didn’t just fall apart… Ali needs to say something to me to make me realise what’s happened that I’ve totally overlooked – Rich is indeed a very sneaky fellow!

The monkeys shift a few of their Bags o’ Tangles and some folks spend a while assembling a tangle or two, almost reducing Shane to tears at one point given how hard he’d been trying to assemble his copy without a huge degree of success. He spends a while talking me through the solution to one of his old puzzle locks that I’ve been singularly unable to solve properly. (Apparently randomly shaking it isn’t counted as a solve! This is troubling news given how many of my past solves rely on this technique!)

Matt and Chris arrive just as a few of us head out for pig rolls which are up to their usual standard. After lunch I sidle up to Matt and swap some cash for a copy of his second keyring puzzle.

Michael is dishing out copies of his new symmetry puzzle now christened Morph – which is quite appropriate given the solutions, albeit I’ve still only found one of the two solutions and I’ve had a copy since the last MPP!

Rich spends a while working on my copy of Midas – the latest Stickman Puzzlebox. He manages to make about as much progress as I’ve made before moving something that wasn’t for moving and ends up with a little extra piece where there shouldn’t be one… there’s plenty of analysis and advice and the conclusion is that it should be something even I am able to fix… (and this weekend has confirmed that to be the case). Rich gets mercilessly mocked for the rest of the day for this wanton act of destruction!

Shane gets challenged to reset a copy of his The Block Puzzle after someone “solved” it and then realised it was really tricky to reset… Shane performs admirably, eventually!

I’ve taken Pavel’s “What’s the name of this puzzle” along after we singularly failed to solve it over the King’s Day weekend. Dan embraces the challenge and soon has the cards neatly laid out on the floor, forgoing the several free tables so that he can connect properly with the cards… in what seems like mere minutes he announces he’s solved it – and while he might not have fully solved it, he’s certainly at least half solved it and a little encouragement sees him solve the rest of it… Dan’s way with words is strong.

We head back to the house where the puzzling and shenanigans continue – perforated gently by a round of fish suppers.

Rich decides he’s not going to be beaten by Stickman so begins dismantling the Borg Box while Chris reminds us all that Rob used to charge a fee for reassembling them, such was the demand when puzzlers realised just how complicated a full disassembly was. Rich does not require the services, although he did sensibly stop after disassembling a panel and a half…

While all that is going on, a few guys were playing with A House with Trees, trying to get it to solve perfectly and not always succeeding, so they developed a game which at one point involved locking it up without the lid in place… which makes solving it rather a lot harder in the absence of some rather crucial visual clues! There was a lot of laughter as each tried to out-shenanigan the next. Steve’s attempt to earn the minimum wage by opening the box to retrieve the £1 coins that Chris had successively hidden inside it was evidently doomed to fail from the start.

It wasn’t the biggest MPP we’ve ever had, but it was an absolute hoot – and definitely worth writing about… next one should be one heck of an event. Why not join us?