Inaugural Northern Puzzle Party

This one took me by surprise, quite literally!

I thought I was heading up north for Frank’s surprise 50^th birthday party, coincidentally a couple of days after my own 50^th birthday. Our conniving wives had been arranging something rather special for Frank’s birthday and I was supposed to be part of the subterfuge by keeping Frank side-tracked during the afternoon while they set up the venue for the party… which all sounded rather plausible… and indeed, that was how it started out when we arrived.

Frank was a bit surprised as he wasn’t expecting us to rock up just before lunch – they live a couple of hours north of us… he managed to recover and duly put the kettle on and made us a coffee while I brought out some puzzles to play with – and the surprise was soon forgotten.

I got the tour of Frank’s new puzzle room and spent a while oohing-and-aahing over the endless shelves of kumiki puzzles of all varieties and vintages… and Frank’s enormous collection of Journet puzzles… and the impossible objects spread over several shelves… you get the picture: Frank has an impressive puzzle collection!

Jo duly laid out an enormous spread for lunch and we literally feasted…

After lunch there was a ring at the doorbell and Big-Steve and Shane rolled in having driven up from London… for the puzzle party I didn’t know about, but seemed to be handily positioned to attend…

A short while later, another ring at the doorbell brought in Simon Nightingale with a pile of puzzles… at this point I’m starting to smell a rat, and realise I’ve been set up almost as much as Frank –  Jo had decided we should have a Northern Puzzle Party and chose the proximity of our milestone birthdays as the best excuse to hold an inaugural NPP.

Shane and Steve get into the birthday spirit and give Frank and I each a unique gift… Shane’s present is a custom HalesLock for each of us: mine is a customised prototype HalesLock3, safely locked inside a wooden presentation (puzzle) box. Over the course of the next hour or so Frank and I try to open the boxes and we struggle – at one point both of us are tapping, banging, spinning and blowing in them with zero impact…

Focus shifts to Steve’s gift – a 50-piece collaboration with Derek Bosch [Thanks chaps!] … a big ball of a thing beautifully packaged in a box, wrapped in a neat little bag…who says boys can’t wrap presents?! I have a careful look at mine and start encouraging Frank to spin his to open it up… with quite a lot of encouragement from Steve… turns out it doesn’t take a lot of encouragement and Frank is soon on his knees on the kitchen floor giving the ball a good old spin … which duly sends most of the 50 pieces flying in all directions and spreading several bags of confetti that had been cunningly installed in the internal void spraying across the floor – with more than a little laughter from the assembled puzzlers (who’s kitchen floor, this was not). 

Frank saw the funny side almost immediately, and then set about collecting the pieces… and the memory stick that had been cushioned by all the confetti inside the void. With the puzzle pieces out of the way, Jo brought out the vacuum cleaner that then did a great job of blowing the confetti even further afield… with a dustpan and brush eventually saving the day and restoring the kitchen to pristine cleanliness once more.

The puzzling gets interrupted for a giant joint birthday cake for the two of us organised by Jo – complete with some serious pyrotechnics and lifelike Allard and Frank figurines sitting next to one another on the top – cue several inappropriate comments about the extent of our friendship and what a nice couple we make… just as well we’re among friends!

Soon after the girls disappear to do some girly stuff (or decorate the hall for Frank’s surprise party later on) and the puzzling continues.

At one point Frank looks up and asks me if I’ve opened Shane’s box yet – apparently the sight of me shaking and banging the thing weren’t enough of a clue – so I admit I haven’t, much to Shane’s amusement – the boxes were apparently an afterthought and weren’t intended to be a serious puzzle at all… yeah, right! He starts throwing hints and suggestions around wildly in the hopes of helping us make progress and eventually we manage to open the boxes… the locks are another story – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the early Haleslock3’s, but this one doesn’t behave properly at all… and a little puzzling later I discover why – it’s a totally different puzzle! It just happens to look the same on the outside… except for the “ALLARD 50” stamped on the one side of course. [Thanks mate!]

Simon has brought along a crate-full of wonders and we let Frank have first go at selecting some new toys in return for the customary donation to charity… I pick a few things for myself before allowing the others to have a go… and then go back for another rake through the leftovers… I will need to be generous in my charitable donation!

Steve suggests that we plug the mystery memory stick into a laptop sometime soon as the content is a little time-sensitive - we all agree that Frank’s work-laptop is probably the best choice and fire it up. There’s a movie file on there so we hit Play and sit back… to watch a number of characters from all around the inter-web wishing Frank and I a Happy Birthday. Being the naïve sort, I assume these wonderful people are all friends of Steve (and Derek) and marvel at the wonderfully diverse set of friends they have… seriously diverse!! I spend at least 10 minutes in tears laughing at the messages and their, err, creativity. By the end of it I am reasonably convinced that Derek and Steve don’t have a politically correct bone in their bodies – and I haven’t cried with laughter that much in an awfully long time!

During the course of the afternoon my phone keeps ringing with various phone numbers I don’t recognise as a variety of international puzzle friends from around the world call in according to a pre-arranged roster to wish Frank and I a Happy Birthday via Facetime… Nigel from a warm-looking Spain; Ali and the girls sang Happy Birthday for us; Peter, Lesley and Roxy wished us well from Canada and Neil wished us a Happy Birthday and showed us around his huge workshop, pausing to show us the blue sky and yellow sun – something we don’t often get to see in the UK! Brian and Sue had realised that when we were having our NPP it would be literally in the middle of their night, so they sent us a pre-recorded birthday message dressed in appropriate puzzling gear: Brian wearing an LED-adorned Rubik’s Cube t-shirt and Sue was dressed as a Rubik’s Cube (2*2*2 as appropriate for someone her size)… a wonderful surprise and super to be joined by our puzzling friends around the world – albeit digitally – thanks for taking the time folks!

Somewhere around 6pm the guys faded under the guise of heading back home, leaving us to confuse Frank a little more as he fished for information about the evening… we told him we were going out for a pizza, which might have been believable for a while… of course when Jo led him blindfolded into the local golf club and we all yelled "Surprise!", the cat was sort of out of the bag… and a fabulous party ensued!

We’re going to have to have another NPP one of these days – they’re great fun! 

Happy Birthday Frank!

Blackjack pastry puzzle box

If Perry McDaniels is selling anything at a puzzle party, there will be a queue, ergo, whenever Perry is selling anything at a puzzle party, I make a bee-line for his table and join the throng of merry puzzlers throwing money at him… it’s a pretty safe bet that you won’t be disappointed if you like puzzle boxes.

A few years ago Perry arrived dressed the part with a Puzzled Guy Bakery outfit – he was selling petit fours… in a slightly altered guise he sold bon-bons for a couple of years and this year he was back as Perry the pastry chef…

A couple of puzzlers had seen pics of his 2017 offering and pronounced it truly delicious – and there was indeed a queue for the finest in wooden pastries that IPP37 could offer – in spite of Perry’s quips about them being “half the puzzle at twice the price”.

Blackjack marks the first in a series of pastries according to the blurb accompanying the puzzle – superb, there will be more of them! 

Visually, this one is stunning – it looks like a yummy chocolate slice with lashings of walnutty chocolate splashed across one end. It’s a bit bigger than the previous sets of Perry’s bakery-inspired products – and it rattles – quite a bit… there is definitely “stuff” going on inside there…

Sitting down to play with this little guy, you will want to spend some time simply admiring it – it is very handsome!

… and when you do begin playing with it, the first move will definitely raise a smile… that’s unexpected!

Spend a little time exploring and it spits out a playing card at you… a picture card to be precise … and you might be wondering how that ties in with the name of this little beastie, and whether there might be another along in due course… and indeed there is – right at the end – Blackjack!

There’s quite a lot of “stuff” along the way… some of it exactly the sort of thing you might expect from a secret opening box, and some of it rather unexpected, if not downright unusual. There is a lot to discover in this little pastry slice… and don’t go thinking that returning it back to the starting position is going to be a piece of cake either!

MPP XXiX

Our 29^th MPP was unusual – for one thing we had an American visitor that none of us knew, joining us for the day / weekend - for another, a bunch of the usual gang couldn’t make it for a number of reasons… so we not only had a very select little gathering, we also had a visitor from far afield hoping to meet the puzzlers he’s only ever seen in the virtual puzzling world… hopefully he wasn't disappointed!

On the Friday evening, we’d had Regan around for dinner and confirmed that he probably wasn’t an axe-murderer, although he was a long way from Kansas… we’d puzzled for a bit before sheer exhaustion set in and I dropped him back at the hotel… where a wedding party kept him up all hours of the night, resulting in him having had very little sleep by the time I collected him in the morning for MPP-proper. 

When the two of us got to the hall we discovered Angela and Peter had already set up their For-Sale table and welcomed the chance to chat… which we sort of did while setting up the rest of the tables and getting the refreshments organised and laid out.

Angela had brought along a bunch of autographed 1^st edition Martin Gardner books for me and I happily wandered over to the ATM to draw the extra cash I needed to add those to my collection.

Dave arrived somewhere in between me getting the milk and soft drinks and my trip over for some extra cash, and he duly set himself up in a corner of the hall…

Pretty soon the core of the regular gang had arrived from London, with Frank arriving a bit later, having presumably had a bit more of a lie-in than the keener souls. 

Big-Steve had arranged for a group order of some brilliant Japanese puzzles that I’d partaken in and he duly played father Christmas giving a few of us an early present – I got a few of Endo-san’s exchange puzzles along with a recent creation of his that is a fantastic little three-piece interlocking puzzle, a copy of Home Alone Husband and a couple of little puzzley-things that I could never have justified getting shipped on their own… cheers Steve!

The usual encouraging puzzle-banter soon set in, with Regan joining in like he’d been one of us for ages – it seems that puzzlers really are a pretty homogenous bunch in some respects.

Regan had brought along a copy of his handmade safe puzzle for everyone to have a bash at – I’d tried my hand at solving it the night before, spectacularly unsuccessfully as it turned out, and I was having more or less exactly the same level of success at MPP. A couple of the others had a bash at encouraging the little aluminium and brass beauty to reveal its secrets and soon enough Oli had it open and was investigating the innards… where a second challenge awaited.

Chris duly followed suit and cracked the safe wide open, and I then spent another while getting resolutely nowhere! [In fact, I think I only managed to finally open it much later after a significant amount of hinting and suggestion from my fellow puzzlers – only I’m SO THICK that I didn’t realise they were actually trying to help me at the time… no idea why that wasn’t the first thought on my mind when they kept at me with what sounded like some rather unhelpful suggestions!] It IS a stunningly well-made puzzle with a fiendishly clever locking mechanism, the likes of which have virtually never been seen in a puzzle before – I bear no shame at not solving this one – it is very clever indeed!

Big-Steve spent a while trying to convince a couple of people to build his copy of Reza 12-20 that he’d had shipped from Australia in pieces…! We’d all seen how complicated this thing was as one half of the IPP37 Host Gift – and Juno had admitted it took him ages to assemble them WITH the solution to hand… so we all told him where to go… which meant he had to sit down and have a bash himself… and of course he was soon joined by a couple of the hardened puzzlers (Chris and Oli) who manly attempted to assemble the beast, coming reasonably close on a couple of occasions to find that Steve had clearly been sent the wrong pieces, as the final piece left out had the wrong notch pattern to enable it to be inserted into the assembly they were all struggling to keep more or less in the right shape. They gave up after a while so I expect that Steve will bring it back in the same number of pieces next time in the hopes of slightly more luck, or more puzzle-assembly-power, at least partly in the form of Louis. 

Pig rolls and the local chippie provided the usual excellent lunch before yet more puzzling…

At some point Chris must have upset Steve awfully because he duly sat down at Chris’ table and set about disassembling and scrambling all of Chris’ puzzles… so Chris responded as every puzzler should, and calmly reassembled them, including one that he didn’t think he knew how to reassemble… good man!

Michael made particularly short work of an IPP37 exchange packing puzzle that Ali gave him – somewhat gob-smacking both of us at the speed that he’d solved it… and what truly amazed us was that he’d totally overlooked the biggest visual clues and still solved it WAY quicker than either of us had managed. 

Regan was made to feel part of the crowd with a number of people successively shoving a puzzle in his paws and saying “Here you’ll like this…” and then goading him into solving them… usually with a fair degree of success. 

At some point late in the afternoon, silly season took over and we had Ali challenging everyone with a bar bet observation puzzle that had almost everyone going for ages - with those who'd caught on duly egging the rest on with all sorts of helpful little goadings... good fun!

At a suitable hour, we all retired back to my place for the traditional fish supper and more puzzles – and there was a lot more puzzling, until I eventually dropped Regan back at the hotel just before midnight – convinced he must be running on pure adrenaline by now.

Next morning, he and Chris were back around at the house for some more banter and puzzling – and I finally managed to crack open Regan’s safe… albeit with a lot of nudging and clueing from the side-lines…

Early that evening I dispatched him toward London on a train so he could do a little sight-seeing before he headed back to Kansas – thanks for coming to visit and introduce yourself, Regan – it was really great to spend some time puzzling with y’all…