King’s Day 2026

Ali’s offered to drive us over again this year so Frank heads down to my place on Thursday evening for some pizza, puzzles and a bed for the night. Next morning we head over to Welwyn where Ali caffeinates us before we head south-ish to pick up Le shuttle, stopping just before at our usual Mickey-D’s for a spot or three to eat. The new fingerprint requirements haven’t yet been fully implemented at Folkstone so our journey is as efficient as ever. We fly through France and only slow down when we hit Antwerp’s traditional traffic jam – we give Louis an update on our progress, but said-traffic-jam holds us in its claws for quite a while so we only end up getting to Louis’ place after 7pm.

The tables are laden with Design Competition puzzles and heaps of snacks and our host sees to it that we’re well-lubricated after our long journey. We offload some supplies from Ali’s truck, but the puzzles we bring in remain largely untouched for the rest of the trip… there are potentially award-winning puzzles to be played with after all!

Somewhere around 11pm we head off to the hotel and check into our rooms after agreeing to meet for breakfast at about 8am… I’m the last to arrive just before 8am. The breakfast buffet is well-stocked and we all make our way through several platefuls. We head back to Louis’ just after 9 where we find even more tables and chairs set up and Nick’s traditional identification sheets with puzzles’ goals carefully described – Louis’ been up late/early printing them off for us and has them spread around the various tables for playing with and potentially solving. (The solutions sides haven’t appeared yet so we’re on our own!)

Over the course of the next few hours we have a steady stream of puzzlers arriving, including the Millers on their way to Rotterdam for a cruise. Everyone digs into the Design Competition entries and the gentle buzz of puzzlers heckling puzzlers in a somewhat encouraging manner ensues.

There’s a fantastically themed pizza challenging you to find all of the appropriate toppings – complete with not-only magical, but downright puzzling mechanics. I manage to retrieve all the toppings but my hubris is short-lived when I realise I’m having a lot of trouble resetting things…

I work my way through a Big Red Barn (Mr Robot reference anyone?) with the odd bit of advice/encouragement from Louis – there aren’t any cheat sheets yet! It’s good fun and you have to be impressed at the quality of the 3D printed puzzles on display this year. I particularly enjoy a cute little pizza joint that has you hunting for your pizza while finding a number of accoutrements along the way.

There’s an intriguing sliding piece puzzle where the actual challenge is to determine the start/end position before convincing yourself that the sliding-piece-bit is in fact doable. Canal had several of us engrossed for a while – trying to build a single canal in a tray using just four pieces – both puzzles providing a fresh puzzling perspective. Louis and Mieke provide a massive spread for the dozen puzzlers puzzling, with the puzzling intensifying (if that were possible) after the lunch shift.

I spend several hours after lunch working on Red Treasure – yet another superbly 3D Printed object with all the heft of something that has a metal chassis. I’ve been getting absolutely nowhere on my copy and if I'm honest, there are several points in the solving journey where I wouldn’t have gotten any further forward if it hadn’t been for a kindly puzzler offering words of advice when I’d been stopped for long enough to want a nudge. This one keeps on and on giving – each time when you think you’re almost done, you realise there’s another layer to go, until you finally discover where the puzzle gets its name from… 

During the course of the afternoon I try to interest a couple of puzzlers in building one of Derek’s 270-piece balls – I’ve printed off a set of the pieces and I’m hoping to get it assembled to give to Wil on Sunday… we have a couple of false-starts before we find a suitably coloured picture on ‘tinternet for us to follow. I get lucky when Oskar gets interested and in the end I’m able to watch him assemble pretty much the entire ball – I “encourage” the final piece into position and it holds together brilliantly - now if I can keep it in one piece I have a gift for Wil with some serious puzzling provenance: designed by Derek and assembled by Oskar!

Around dinner time Louis orders in a massive pile of pizzas and we feast in great Italian style.

There’s a bit more post pizza puzzling before most of the gang heads off homeward and we all pile into Ali’s truck in search of our escape room challenge for the evening… which turns out to be quite spectacular! The Crimsons Recipe starts in a bijoux bistro and then takes us on a magical journey where not everything is as it seems. Ali enjoys shooting some defenceless pigeons (eventually) and we discover some deep, rather dark secrets, all beautifully strung together with some wonderful story-telling… the puzzles and escaping are almost secondary – it’s a brilliant experience!

We drop Louis off at home and head back to the hotel where we reset and agree again to meet for brekkie at 8am.  Breakfast on Sunday is a relaxed affair, safe in the knowledge that we can’t leave before 9:30 for fear of getting to Wil’s too early… and when we do head off, we find the city is intent on digging up chunks of road in the direction our satnav is hoping to send us. The city wins and we head off in the wrong direction until the satnav eventually relents and gives us a new way out.

Ali gets us to Wil’s place bang on time and we park a block away because Wil’s roadworks are even more extreme! We let ourselves in through the back door and find Jan Willem and Wil deep in conversation while Wil’s getting the food and beverage station laid out in the kitchen… Wil likes the ball. 

It doesn’t take long for piles of puzzlers to arrive and there’s a goodly throng both outside and in. Oskar has his traditional table out in the sun (we’re careful to keep the puzzles cooler this year after last year’s wilting PLA saga!) and he takes great pleasure, almost too much, in showing a bunch of puzzlers his Taze-Maze which is literally a blind maze hooked up to a taser to let you know where the walls are… Ali manages to find his way through the maze with just a gentle smell of burning flesh in the air. 

At one point Nanco wanders around giving everyone a laser-cut symmetry challenge, which we totally fail to solve until much later that evening. I’ve taken the left-over balls from MPP and they duly get assembled and given new homes, with Louis making sure that he assembles a three-layered monster just to show it can be done. No-one knows where the small heap of sticky tape comes from afterwards…

I spend some time indoors, fiddling with some wonderfully collectible puzzles that I suspect I only see once a year at Wil’s place. I end up spending more time than I should playing with a few old dexterity puzzles and confirm my hypothesis that random shaking is virtually as successful as slow, careful tapping and tilting.

Wil provides a wonderfully generous spread for tea-time, lunch and afternoon tea before we all head off into town for dinner. Toby asks for directions but he decides he shouldn’t trust mine so asks someone else who duly consults Google Maps and literally gives him the exact same directions… we do see him at dinner so he must have followed my directions.

We rearrange the restaurant so we can all sit around one big table and it’s very convivial. Nanco’s symmetry puzzles (for it turns out they were all different!) come out and duly get mostly solved… with some sets providing not only a rotational symmetry solution (the challenge) but also a mirror symmetry solution…

After dinner we wander across to the riverside and grab a large number of ice creams – everyone loves an ice cream – before heading back to Wil’s for some more chat and puzzling.

When we do decide to leave, I forget my phone on the couch and realise a few minutes down the road what I’ve done… so Ali takes us back to Wil’s in a large loop and I duly collect my phone before getting engaged in a conversation with Wil about one of Doog’s boxes – good news Steve: I’ve found your globe-travelling box!

I make my excuses and run back to the waiting starship destroyer and this time we head back to Eindhoven, via Louis’ to collect some books…

I sleep very well and we head back across to Blighty after brekkie. Ali makes great time, with traffic slowing us down a bit around, you guessed it, Antwerp… we make use of Le Shuttle’s lounge and each get a generous lunch bag for the (half-hour) train journey.

We stop at Steve’s to drop him off and collect some shed-envy – TBMHQ having received a significant upgrade recently we’re keen to see it in person and it doesn’t disappoint – it is a brilliant space for designing, making and prototyping…

We offload the books and bags into Frank’s car and head back up to Brum following Google’s wise advice and travelling some roads neither of us have ever seen before, but Google somehow takes us around the afternoon traffic rather deftly and delivers us safely to Barnt Green after another brilliant weekend away with my mates… thank you all for making it such a brilliant weekend - and especially to Frank and Ali for some superb chauffeuring!