MPP XXXXV

[Disclaimer - do not use my roman numerals for anything - you will be tirelessly mocked - yes I know they're wrong... they have been for quite some time...]

Our first MPP of 2023 was a fairly sedate affair – a small, select group of puzzlers gathered for just an afternoon’s puzzling as the hall wasn’t available in the morning (for the first four months of the year!). That probably discouraged some of the usual crowd, and then a few folks cried off on the morning with a variety of ailments from light sniffles through to full-blown COVID – thank you for not bringing those!

When I rolled up to the hall, Steve, Ali and Rich were already waiting patiently and Phil arrived immediately afterwards. The lads set up some tables and chairs while I sorted out the refreshments (priorities!) and then unpacked some puzzles, grabbed a cup of coffee and a fistful of biscuits before settling down to some puzzling.

Oli and his clan arrived, and after the obligatory greetings Kirsty and the boys headed out to the science museum while Oli was allowed to stay and puzzle for the afternoon. Tamsin, Mike, Frank and Dale appeared at some point and that was it for the rest of the day – 10 happy puzzlers passing puzzles around and “encouraging” one another… with plenty of biscuits because I’d typically catered for double that number.

Phil had brought along a few copies of his latest creation, Free the Washer, and I hastily shoved a fistful of twenty pound notes in his hand and took a copy off him. It’s a hefty brass and steel cage with a little split washer languishing around inside - the steel bars doing a pretty good job of trapping the washer. I saw Frank playing with a copy and found out the next day that he’d solved it at MPP – it took me a while to solve it over the following two days – Frank definitely deserves the bragging rights on that one!

I’d taken along the latest haul from Pelikan, some of which I’d managed to have a play with already… Cerebrus was the definite favourite – three pieces in a frame that wind around and round one another over a huge number of moves before the first piece is released from the frame.

Ali had brought along a huge container jammed with Lego puzzles and after enjoying my first experience of a Lego puzzle quite a lot, I ended up spending a fair while working my way through a few of them until disaster struck and I sprayed Lego pieces across the floor and then spent ages unsuccessfully trying to rebuild the puzzle… I even involved the local Lego expert, Oli in my ultimately unsuccessful attempts to rebuild it so had to give it back to Ali in bits, and grovel quite a bit. (It took Ali all of about 5 minutes to rectify the situation the next morning proving that (a) I know nothing about fixing Lego puzzles and (b) I need to find a new Lego expert.)

A few folks had a bash at my Pooplock and all got stuck pretty much exactly where I’ve been stuck for a few months now… which is a pity because I was hoping someone would be able to make some further progress so that I’d be able to follow in their footsteps… sadly that sneaky plan came to nought, and Quigley just watched us suffering and grinned.

Ali and I had a long chat about PuzzledByPiker’s Pocket Change puzzles – we’d both solved the Yellow and Orange puzzles and had both made exactly the same discoveries on the red one and stopped in exactly the same spot… I don’t know if our chat helped Ali, but I’m certainly none the wiser and still stumped!

A few folks had a bash at Eros, but I didn’t spot anyone making any serious progress so I ‘m probably going to have to solve that one on my own too!

The Christmas Karakuri boxes all got a good playing with Kawashima-san’s Origin Regression Cube definitely winning out on the puzzling front, while the Angry Lion and Cat & cardboard box vied for cutest of the bunch.

Somehow our five hours flew by and we found ourselves hurriedly packing up to vacate the hall by 6pm – we almost made it…

Sadly there would be no fish suppers at chez Walker this time either, so it really was a strange MPP – normal service should resume at the end of May!

ShiftBrick Mini Lego Puzzle Box

One of the great things about hanging out on Peter Hajek’s Virtual End of Year Puzzle Party is that you get to see what puzzles everyone else really enjoyed over the last year… and every now and then you get a recommendation from one of your mates that you just have to try out.

…and so it ‘twas that Peter Wiltshire made me aware of a great little Lego puzzle from ShiftBrick. Now Peter knows his puzzles, and if he reckons something is good, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to like it… so I ordered a few copies thinking that some of my local-ish mates might want a copy too…

It duly arrived, rather well-packaged and I have to say it’s a cute little guy! There’s a handsome coloured pattern on the top, one or two gaps around the sides, and a single little green brick on one side… and your mission is to expose the money tile on that little green brick.

I started fiddling and found myself making some progress before having to shift gear a little to make some more progress and then after a few more steps, amusingly I found myself a little stuck – which might be a bit embarrassing if you think this is just a little one-inch cubed collection of Lego bricks…

It turns out this little puzzle has a couple of unexpected tricks up its sleeve – it may well lull you into thinking you understand what’s going on and all you need to do is explore all the possibilities – until that stops working and you might even need to Think ©! <I did!>

Compact little gem of a puzzle that I’m really glad Peter alerted me to… cheers Peter!

4 PAC

Hajime Katsumoto has produced some wonderful packing puzzles so it didn’t surprise me when 4 PAC joined Penta in a Box, Slide Packing and 5L Box in winning an award in the 2021 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.

I had a little trouble tracking down a copy until Saint Nick popped one in the post to me last Christmas – thanks Nick!

This is another lovely, honest packing puzzle. You get four identical PAC-men (PAC-mans?! Nah…) and a box that is clearly large enough to accommodate all of them – the only little wrinkle is the clear acrylic top that restricts access to just a slit on the one side. There are a number of handy holes in some panels to allow you to manipulate things inside – so that’s probably going to be necessary…

When you start putting your PAC-men into the box, you’ll find you’ve got a fair amount of room to re-position things. Once you’ve got a couple of them in there, your freedom of movement starts getting significantly reduced, and if you’re anything like me, by the time you’re trying to get the last PAC-man in there, the hole is either in the wrong place, or something’s in the way – which may be two sides of the self-same coin, I guess.

I spent a while exploring different ways for the pieces to interact. I spent some time trying to analyse what the final insertion absolutely HAD to be (I kept having doubts because I couldn’t see how to get to the stage just before that…) and then I spent a long time fiddling with a few pieces inside the box and rearranging them until the cows came home…(not a spoiler).

Sometime during all of that, the weirdest thing happened: I realised that I’d achieved exactly what I’d been trying to set out, but I hadn’t recognised it as I was looking at it from the wrong side – yeah, not the sharpest crayon, eh?! From there it was a short little shift, shimmy and drop the final piece into place and I was done – fat smile time.

A super design from Katsumoto-san, beautifully made by Lensch-san, and generously gifted by Saint Nick – thank you (all) for a great puzzle!

Keep Locked

I counted myself exceptionally lucky to be able to purchase a copy of Robert Yarger’s thirty sixth numbered puzzlebox – The Keep Locked. Truth be told it arrived several months ago, but I haven’t been able to blog about it until just now…

It arrived a couple of days before Gill and headed off to Boston for a couple of weeks so I managed only a little bit of playtime on a few of the evenings before we flew out. In that time managed to make a little progress but I could see that I was nowhere near completing this E.P.I.C. solve, so I reset it all back to the start position and went off on holiday… and then a few jet-lag-riddled days after we got home, I was heading up to the Northern Puzzle Party, so I made sure that I took the little fortress along with me for others to play with.

Shane ended up supervising several solvers as they wended their way through the solve and I managed to avoid spotting too many spoilers as I really wanted to have a good go at it myself, safe in the knowledge that I was going to really enjoy it.

I deliberately left it alone for a while on my desk and then ended up taking it to an MPP where a few more folks managed to solve it… and then it sat on my desk, sort of in pride of place while I furiously avoided playing with it until I knew I had enough time to really enjoy it… and that time came this afternoon – I had literally an afternoon free, and I wanted to be puzzled – kismet.

This isn’t a small puzzle – it’s more of a statement puzzle – it defies you to have a go – a bit like the 1998 hit from The Mekons. The Keep has four turrets – each colour-coded to the padlocks hanging down from them – I’m guessing that’s not a coincidence. On the front there’s a handsome lion above the heavy doors and portcullis. Around the back there’s a round Stickman logo dancing in the dawn…

I’d seen Rob’s wooden padlocks in the past but these raise the game even further – four locks in different woods – all looking a little different – waiting to be challenged. A few months ago my experience had been limited to fiddling with the locks, so I dived in there again…

Each lock literally has a personality of it’s own, some are polite and formal and others shout and kick… and once they’ve all been dealt with, there are lots of bits and pieces to keep track of.

From there on it was all new territory, and I can definitely say that things get a bit extreme from there on in… there are some seriously funky things that happen along the way, there are times when you’re up a creek without a paddle and you need to pay close attention to find the paddle that Rob’s carefully stashed for you behind some rocks.

As always, there’s a generous sprinkling of tools around and if you’re paying (very!) close attention, it’ll be clear what you need to do – a few times I found myself wondering where to head to next and only when I took stock, did I realise that the answer was right there in front of me all along…

This solve is an EPIC journey – another classic Stickman.

Ziggy

With the success of Radek’s recent collaboration on Amulet comes a fresh collaboration with New Zeelander Douglas Menzies to produce Ziggy – a goofy-looking little guy who seems to have misplaced his smile.

Your mission, for surely you must accept it, is to help him find his smile…

Ziggy starts out looking more than a little lopsided – with a couple of bolts for eyes not exactly well-matched… and a confused looking half-grin. He appears to be machined from aluminium with a healthy gold coat of anodising, a handsome logo on the base and a wonderfully creative use of the dovetail on the side to provide the “Z” in Ziggy – nice touch!

There’s probably an obvious place to start fiddling and that leads to the discovery of a really handy tool which in turn provides more progress…

..and then you may well find yourself up against a bit of a brick wall… with nary a smile in sight.

Time to think (c) :-)

The next bit is rather clever and something not seen in many puzzles – it will reward careful observation and a little thinking outside the box, and once you’ve got that bit cracked, you’re rewarded with a wonderfully happy Ziggy.

An excellent little puzzle guaranteed to make puzzlers smile, first at the major “A-ha!!” moment, and then at the sight that greets you at the end of the solve.

A(nother) excellent collaboration from Radek!

Dia-BALL-ical

…that was George’s comment on my blog post about Nine Balls a couple of weeks back... and at the time I happened to be printing some of George’s recent designs, that he calls Octaballs, so it was only fair that that became the blog title.

George has designed some really interesting interlocking puzzles and spent a while a few years back doing an exhaustive analysis of possible Pennyhedrons with Chinny. More recently he’s switched gears and changed geometries a bit, and then wrapped them in a shape that’s a cross between a ball and an octahedron – which is why George christened them Octaballs.

I spotted them on my favourite 3D Printing site (George has made the designs available for free for anyone to print their own copies! Top man!!) and thought they looked interesting so threw some G-code and a pile of filament at the puzzle-making-machine and a short while later I had four identical pieces that assembled into an Octaball… and I was hooked.

Assembly isn’t trivial, but it’s pretty clear what you need to do and it’s reasonably straightforward to get everything properly aligned and Octaball one is assembled.

Octaball two was available in two flavours – the first uses two pairs of pieces and, while it’s a bit trickier than number one, it isn’t that bad an assembly challenge. (It also has a neat expand-and-contract action when you push on opposite triangles.) The alternative assembly swaps out one of each of the pairs for another piece and I like that one even more – it really steps up the “interest” factor.

Octaballs three and four are both made up of four unique pieces, although they do share some pieces with one another and indeed with some of the other designs. These guys are sods to assemble – in fact George’s maker’s notes warn that they might seem to be impossible and not to give up.

Those last two provide a serious assembly challenge as the shapes of pretty much every single piece requires the other three pieces to be virtually completely disassembled in order to introduce the final piece… George’s warning is not there for nothing – I reckon these things will reduce seasoned puzzlers to quivering wrecks… you’ve been warned – they are indeed dia-BALL-ical!

Nice one George!!

 

Allard’s Christmas Puzzle 2022 – the answers…

Happy New Year Puzzlers!

Traditionally I give everyone until the end of the year to submit their answers before I publish what I think the answers are, so I reckon it's about time...

First of all a massive thank you to everyone who had a bash at my puzzle this year – it hadn’t been play-tested and I wasn’t sure if anyone was going to get through it… but a few hours after it got published, I had my first correct entry, so I guess I needn’t have worried too much…

As I write this, I’ve had 7 correct entries, most of which came in on, or fairly soon after, Christmas Day – haven’t you folks got anything better to do!?

Here's what I thought the answers were:

First off you were presented with some rogue underlining in the opening text – if you noted all the underlined letters, you were rewarded with the wonderfully witty “this is not a secret message”… it goes downhill from here…

There were some random encoded phrases floating around the page which ended up saying silly things like “hamsters rule”, “ where is Chico” and “he’s behind you” – I was bored and figured I’d trot out some of the old MPP memes… none of that helped you solve the puzzle.  The “lorem ipsum dolor” in pseudo-plaintext was also my idea of a laugh… I told you it was going downhill.

There were three puzzles numbered [a], [B] and [c] and then some crossword style clues that I’d wittily referred to as Angry-word(s) – did I mention it went downhill?

[a] was a simple set of semaphore letters that decoded to “habe yiu triet llowiny on it? – which is either really sloppy semaphore, or the spelling mistakes are what’s really interesting… hopefully you spotted the similarity to that oft-quoted really helpful phrase to throw at fellow puzzlers “have you tried blowing on it?” – and the spelling mistakes give you “bitly”… which is useful.

[c] is a simple optical trick – stand well back and it clearly says “2022” – look at it closely and it’s a table with bad formatting…

[B] was the puzzle I liked most of all this year – you have some partly coloured-in wreaths (Yay, Christmas activities!) in a three by two arrangement where the [B] is clearly lying on it’s side… so if you had the “B” upright, you’d have a two by three arrangement, and the colours might give you some indication of what was on and what was off … sort of like a Braille letter? Now if only there was some way of knowing what order to read off the Braille letters, this would be simple – and it is when you realise that everybody universally knows the order of the colours on the rainbow – so the Braille decodes to “allard”, e.g. in ROYGBIV, red is used only in top left-hand corner, which gives you an “a”... and so on.

Okay, so you have answers for [a], [B] & [c], now what – in case you hadn’t already figured that out, the Angry-words tell you what to do… the answers in order are: CON, Ca, TEN, eight, ABC – notice the full stop after line 5 – that indicated a break – 6 clued to PUNCTUATE – another full stop, and the final clue was Go For IT! … which then collapses into CONCATENATE ABC. Punctuate. Go For It!

Following those instructions you derive bit.ly/allard2022 which linked you to the familiar assortment of pictures and some instructions “I want a designer… (not the inspirer).” and “time and titles (at least initially!) are crucial, eh blogger boy?”

You had seven pictures from various blog posts over the years and if you identified the pictures, noted the publication date (clued by time – sorry I went with the slightly misleading “time” for alliteration rather than “date”) and the title of the blog post – and then considered just the first letters of the blog posts, ordered by date, you got “WINENOT” – or with the usual spacing: Wine Not – which if you read the blog post, or Brian’s web page on the puzzle you’d know Brian Young designed it after being inspired by EM Wyatt’s original two dimensional puzzle.(Hopefully that bit confirmed your answer!)

Final answer: Brian Young.

….and the first correct entry arrive in my inbox a little over 4 hours(!) after the puzzle was first published – massive congratulations to Brendan Perez for being the first across the line again this year!!

Not long after him came St Nick, Stefan and The Rammer and after a respectable break we also had correct entries from Mike Q, Chris P and Mike W – well done all of you – you’ve earned bragging rights!

I'll be reaching out to Brendan (our WINNA!) and Mike W (my random draw) very shortly.

Allard’s Christmas Puzzle 2022

I didn’t want this to be the first year without a Christmas puzzle on the blog – so here you go.

To be honest, I don’t expect anyone to solve it, it hasn’t been checked and there might well be gremlins in there. Sorry if there are any snafus – I’m sure you’ll work it out, you are a metagrobologist after all… hope you have fun!

 

<Link to a hi-res version of that doc> 

 

Usual arrangements: email me your answer to allard *DOT* walker ~AT~ gmail &DOT& com -  if anyone gets it right, there'll be bragging rights - puzzles for the first one past the post and a random draw from all participants. 

... and I'll publish what I thought the answer was at the end of the year.

VMPP IIX

Having promised we wouldn’t just stop our Virtual MPP get-togethers once we managed to start getting back together in the hall for actual in-person MPPs, we organised VMPP IIX (Yes, I butcher Roman Numerals for fun, I’m a bad person!) for about a week ago.

We stuck to the established schedule of a morning, afternoon and evening session so we could include folks from all around the world, and this time we had a major drawcard for the afternoon session, well, almost as big as Frank’s legendary Pu(b)zzle Quizzes.

The morning session was billed as literally just some puzzle chat and a scavenger hunt because those have gone down pretty well in the past and they give people an opportunity to show us their puzzles, something that seems vaguely appropriate for a puzzle party.

Dor showed us a copy of Boaz’s new Loophole lock – one that got several thumbs-up from around the virtual room – I’ve already told both of the folks who read my blog that I’m a big fan. Louis admitted to be somewhat puzzled by JCC’s Sun Box – one that I’ve had partially opened on my desk for months now – at least I’m not the only one making heavy weather of it – I’m in good company if Louis isn’t just bashing through the solution.

Goetz recommended the Pocket Change set of trapped coin puzzles from Puzzled by Piker and Dan showed us his copy of Mikael Simo’s Pooplock which was being readied for solving. Nigel gave a big shoutout to Bruns’ Bomb Destroyer Puzzle and Frank told us how much he was enjoying his Exit The Game Advent Calendar – we’ve been comparing notes and both been really enjoying the mini challenges presented daily – the team who create these games are really inventive.

Ken was happy to share his copy of the Craighill Wavelinks Kickstarter and we all agreed that “Rod dun good” on that one! Brian admitted to being somewhat puzzled by the copy of Pennypincher that he picked up at MPP earlier in the year. Peter showed us a new Window Lock from Dick Hensel that sounds like it’s definitely going to be worth keeping an eye out for when Dick’s decided that it’s ready for public release – he’s still tuning and tweaking a couple of things at the moment to incorporate some of the guys’ feedback.

From there Ali and Steve took over and ran a bunch of lightning rounds of scavenger hunts, starting with an Eric Fuller puzzle, then a pair of puzzles starting with “E” & “F” respectively, before heading off into some wonderfully esoteric territory including “A puzzle that Steve knows the name of” and then the obvious corollary “A puzzle that Steve doesn’t know the name of”… each round included special rules, some of which were announced up front and some of which may have been made up on the spur of the moment. In one round you scored double if others had the same selection as you and in another round that meant you scored nil… there was a fair amount of fun, some actual scoring and even an announcement of a winner and some losers. Dan came in first place, Nigel came in second last and I managed to take the wooden spoon – which probably served me right given my selection for the “Puzzle Steve knows the name of” round – you’ll need to watch the video for that one (about 1:42 and a bit in…) – this is a PG blog… I may have been crying with laughter at that point so coming last didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.

We combined our afternoon session with Nick’s announcement of the winners of the 2023 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition, lending a massive amount of credibility to our normal gathering of the rabble. Nick was up bright and early West Coast time and ran the traditional slideshow showing all of the entries, revealing the designers’ names for the first time while folks joined the call. The lure of the announcements was indeed great, and it was great to see a whole bunch of the designers and makers themselves joining to congratulate the winners.

Before launching into the announcement of the winners, Nick paused to pay tribute to Eric Fuller, noting that his IRMO Box had won a Jury First Prize Award in the 2008 Puzzle Design Competition.

Between Nick and I we managed to tee up most of the designers and got them to say a few words by way of an acceptance speech. We worked our way through the Top Ten Vote Getters before singling out the three Jury Honourable mentions and then the three Jury First prize winners. Mittan was a popular Jury Grand Prize Winner for Juno and Brian took the Puzzlers’ Award for Abraham’s Well.

Once all of the winners had been announced, we took the opportunity to talk to the designers about their puzzles and their design process. Theo surprised us by telling us that his unusual packing designs in conjunction with Symen all relied on old-fashioned manual design and didn’t use any fancy software they’d cooked up between themselves. Peter Canham talked about how he started out designing his puzzles to stump his kids and how he’d managed to find the wood that went into making his Ripple box. Brian told us where the idea for the main mechanism in Abraham’s Well had come from and then went on to talk a little about his next sequential discovery puzzle.  

There was a great question from Stefan on prototype failure rates and how to get through to a successful puzzle in the end, and another from Gary on the ideal size of the finished puzzle – which resulted in some interesting thoughts on the various constraints and the importance of playability. It was a great opportunity to learn from the mass of design experience in the virtual room.

From there we went on to remembering Eric Fuller, sharing stories about him and talking about some of his epic puzzles over the years. Gary recalled always being next to Eric at the puzzle exchange given the proximity of their surnames and surprised a few of us when he told us how much Eric enjoyed opera – if you ever needed proof that Eric was one-of-a-kind…

A couple of the gang were coaxed into talking about the time that Eric hauled out his one-wheel in the hotel lobby in San Diego and managed to convince a few people to have a go on it after telling them it was as easy to ride as a Segway… while there were no broken bones that evening (I suspect alcohol may have relaxed the fallers!) there were some bruises and strains that lasted quite a while.

There was a common theme about just how thoroughly unselfish Eric always was in a few of the stories – from setting up Cubic Dissection as a platform where others would be able to sell their puzzles to encouraging new designers and makers. It was great to be reminded of the gentle goading Eric got to encourage him into having a go at making Greg Benedetti’s NOS burrs late one night in the design competition room – and then recalling the utter perfection that he produced that series with.

Eric was truly wonderful, unique individual. His skills were legendary and his prices were always lower than they should have been. He cared deeply about making sure that all of his customers were happy with his work – aggressively fixing anything – even things that weren’t his fault. The puzzle community has lost a wonderful soul.

The evening session was a pretty select affair, coinciding as it did with England meeting France in the semi-finals of the footie world cup. There was very little chat about said football, especially after Yaccine told us the French were 1-0 up…

There was chat about puzzles currently on the to-be-solved pile – I admitted to having Fermat meets Fuller in that place for several months now and Marc confessed to being similarly confused by Roger’s Bolt.

There was some invaluable shopping advice from Steve hidden among all the puzzle chatter but frankly it’s not worth hunting out...

Frank’s latest Pu(b)zzle Quiz did not disappoint! There was plenty of Christmas trivia (where I discovered I know very little about Christmas, and trivia), the obligatory dad jokes seamlessly(!) woven in, some words that Frank made up and lots of questions about the Puzzle Design Competition over the years after he discovered there was a search function on the Competition website… along the way there was plenty of banter and even a joke or two.

At the end of the quiz, one Harry Kane was triumphant (although sadly his namesake wasn’t later on that evening), with Michel and Sam coming in second and third. I think I managed tenth spot… a decidedly sub-par performance, but I had a good laugh along the way!  

After the quiz, things went downhill a little, especially when “some people” (Steve!) realised that Nick’s search engine would let you find naughty words in the design competition entries… so we were regaled with the number of male chickens and letters before “S” among the competition entries. Nick immediately turned safe-search functionality on…

Bizarrely at one point there was a semi-mass-waving-of-hamsters for no apparent reason… before Tomas told us all about the planned Finnish Puzzle Party in Vaasa on the second weekend in June next year… mark your calendars and reach out to Tomas for details.

All in all, another fun day with puzzling friends from around the world… thanks for joining us and contributing to the fun/mayhem.

Thanks to Wil who lurked in the background all day long and supplied all of the screenshots for the blog post!

Morning Video

Afternoon video

Evening video

[Oh and we promised we wouldn’t mention that Tamsin fell asleep in the afternoon session… ]

Loophole

Boaz has serious pedigree when it comes to puzzle locks, so when he announces he has a new puzzle I always pay attention… I also usually pay up and end up getting puzzled.

When Boaz announced the launch of Loophole, I did what I always do and soon after I had a neat little black bag with the usual logo sitting on my desk begging me to play…

Inside there’s a somewhat doctored NABOB padlock with a key attached to the shackle for safe-keeping. Removing the key from the shackle (that part isn’t meant to be a puzzle – whatever you do, don’t ever admit you found that bit challenging! ;-) ) enables you to insert it into the locking barrel and simply turn the key to open the padlock… YEAH RIGHT!

OK, you CAN insert the key – but for the life of you, you won’t get that key to turn….

Time for some closer observation – there’s one rather obvious modification on the face of the padlock: there is a hole going right through the darn thing! The first “O” in Loophole is fresh air(!) … which is interesting, as Laurie was always minded to say.

Next up there’s another dirty great hole in the side of the thing… and when you shake it, it rattles. It’s all rather confusing.

When you do approach it properly and with some deference, it will begin to give up its secrets – you’ll find some even more interesting things, and then possibly even begin to postulate on interplay. There are a couple of things to think on and a really interesting challenge to befuddle.

Find a suitable strategy and you’re laughing – laughing, and unlocking the padlock.

Once you’ve solved this little guy you really do have to marvel at not only the ingenuity, but also just how well all that “stuff” has been disguised and camouflaged.

Bravo Boaz!