Traffic 15

I spotted a new puzzle from Yuu Asaka on social media a little while back so I duly put in an order for a few copies, knowing that some of my mates were going to want a copy as well…

This one really stands out for me - it presents as a simple enough packing puzzle -  a square tray with a couple of rounded corners, nine big white pieces, some with rounded-corners again and then three pairs of traffic sign sort of arrows. The white pieces have cut-outs for the arrows and it’s pretty easy to see how things need to go together to make the spaces that you seek… and you can pretty much just do that for virtually all of the pieces… except there’s always one stubborn arrow that just won’t slot into place… what’s interesting is that it’s not always the same piece that won’t slot into place, but you are always left with one… “which is interesting” as Laurie used to say. 

Somewhere around this point I realise that my usual approach of just trying to bash things in randomly probably isn’t going to serve me well, so I take a little of my own advice(!) and I Think(C) a little…

…and it dawns on me that there are some rather interesting constraints I hadn’t spotted into my random packings… 

Clearly I’m now onto something important so I explore that with renewed vigour, only to come up somewhat short yet again - even more analysis may well be required…

So I Think(C) even more… experiment a little and then remind myself of just how devious some of Yuu’s other designs have been in the past, and throw away all of my preconceived ideas, even the ones I hadn’t realised I had… and that turns out to be rather important - the solution is excellent and I love how it’s literally taken me through three whole cycles of thinking I’ve known what to do, and then realizing I didn’t in order to finally settle on the solution. 

… this is definitely one of my favorite puzzles from this very clever designer!

NPP 2023 (part 2)

I’m an absolute eedjit!

Not only did I ignore most of the photos I’d taken during the course of the day at NPP, but I also omitted one of the funniest stories of the day… so here are some more pics and the story I forgot!

This story starts with Frank’s pre-NPP rituals – he likes to dust the puzzles in his puzzle cave so that when we move things around to find puzzles to play with, we don’t spread the puzzle-dust all around the house – at least that’s what I think he said.

During said ritualistic cleansing, Frank spotted that his Klein Bottle was a little (puzzle-)dusty and set about cleaning it… and at some point he decided that introducing some water would be helpful – yes, yes, we ALL know… and that didn’t go quite to plan, so on the Saturday morning Frank had a slightly moist Klein Bottle with some little drops of water in some rather hard to reach places…

Which is where Steve, our super-cleaner takes up the challenges and broadly announces that what it needs is rice – everyone who’s ever seen anything on the internet knows that rice is used to dry out anything precious… Frank helpfully provides a 3-kilogram sack of rice (Basmati, if you’re interested) and some rice is duly decanted into a lovely little milk jug (no milk is currently in residence).

Steve pours a little into the orifice and shakes it around and it does indeed do a passable job of mopping up the moisture – HURRAH!

Somewhere around now Dan and Andrew arrive and between the usual greetings, Dan asks what Steve is up to so he explains that Frank had tried washing his Klein Bottle only to find some moisture trapped inside it so we’re trying to help him – Dan solemnly raises his hand and comes up with the single geekiest comment of the day: “Hang on – may I just take exception to the fact that there is moisture inside of a Klein Bottle?” – cue short philosophical discussion about the fact that there is no inside of a Klein Bottle.

Anyhow – back to the rescue mission - the rice, however, is now somewhat damp, and doesn’t really slide as well as it used to and sort of sticks to the glass and won’t come out… but Steve doesn’t panic, for he knows that the answer to this new problem is in fact more rice… enough rice to bash the original rice off the wall and carry it out of the way with its momentum!

By now Rich is involved and they dispense with the little milk jug and resort to pouring rice straight from the 3-kilogram sack into the dainty Klein Bottle… until they fill it with rice.

Right about now Quigley looks up from his puzzle and tells the lads they’re all idiots and they’re just going to end up with white rice dust inside it (I know, I know – but you know what he means!).

Undeterred, Steve persists with the Klein Bottle puzzle until all of the rice, and indeed all traces of the moisture are out of the Bottle… which would have been absolutely brilliant had it not been for the little film of white rice dust coating the inside of the glass… Quigley doesn’t crow, much…

Frank declares it even messier than before he’d started his ritual and duly puts it under the warm water tap and washes it again… this time he refuses to give it to Steve and places it on the radiator in the kitchen… where it dries gently without the need for any further rice.

No Klein Bottles were harmed in the making of this story – some rice may been sacrificed in the name of science. 

NPP 2023

Frank and I almost share a birthday, and that’s a good enough excuse for a puzzle party, every year. There’s some debate over when the first Northern Puzzle Party was, since Frank and I didn’t know about the first one – sure, we were both there, we just didn’t realise it was actually an NPP, anyhoo – about a week ago we had another…

Some of the lads drove up on the Friday and had an early start on the puzzling and some games – one of which saw Steve repeatedly chasing Frank’s wife around the ground floor of the house waving something – don’t ask – I have no idea.

Gill and I headed up on Saturday morning a bit earlier than we usually do having taken the hounds to their weekend holiday home the night before – glad we did that as the traffic was really nice and light – it was certainly better than when Andrew and Dan headed up the road a couple of hours later!

As we arrived, we were handed a hot drink and a large selection of cakes, to which we added a tub of Gill’s delicious honeycomb rocky road. Mike and Tamsin had already arrived and the Monkeys plus Rich were well-settled-in from the day before. There were one or two puzzles on the dining room table and the kitchen island already… I probably didn’t need to bring a crate of puzzles along.

I’d brought along a bunch of puzzles that I hadn’t solved yet in the hopes that some kind soul would solve them for me, and that sort of worked once or twice – folks would take the bait and then duly solve them in front of me – usually without letting me see anything that might just resemble a spoiler – and then scrambling them again… the one exception was Rich’s solve of my copy of Climburr – he duly dismantled it and then “reassembled” it in a configuration that has had me scratching my head for a week now – unable to either take it apart or actually put it into the proper assembled position. (That’s what mates are for, eh?!)

Several folks successfully solved my copy of Triple Product and waved it in front of my snout snuggly inside its little acrylic box and I still have no idea how to solve it…

Steve and I spent a while playing with a pre-production copy of Oskar’s Screw Pack – seven interacting screws screw into a large nut-shaped frame – we took turns at trying to build on one another’s’ logical deductions and until we’d jointly solved it in theory, and then started putting it together – at which point we realised there was another potential little issue – so we co-solved that one too and then had it all neatly reassembled… however, that wasn’t sufficient for our Steve – who then proceeded to find a lovely chaotic “solution” with all the screws at different heights – the perfect “assembly” to leave it in for those with OCD to worry to about.

Some time before lunch Andrew and Dan arrived having had a bit of a nightmare journey up the M6. Frank called Lunch and duly rolled out several trays of sandwiches and wraps – the Potts track-record of over-catering remains sound.

Sometime after lunch I tried to interest some folks in attempting my World Traveller Society Kickstarter adventure box… I’d had a little dabble at it a week or so earlier and solved the first puzzle, only to hit a brick wall of “This is tough, I’m going to need help – why don’t I take this along to NPP and get some help from some real puzzle solvers?!” During the course of the rest of the day several people did indeed pitch in and try to help – Tamsin did a sterling job of opening up the first compartment in spite of me giving her a duff steer on where to line up the answer on the first padlock. That provided a veritable trove of intriguing looking artefacts and very little idea of where to go next… so we tried a few avenues and generally came up blank on most of them. After some serious head-scratching and not a lot of progress, we elected to try some hints and ended up wandering down a long and winding road right into a rabbit hole… having traced through all of the hints, and the actual answer – we found ourselves a bit lost as to how the heck we were supposed to settle on that answer, so we tried another puzzle – only to find ourselves in a similar position once more, and then not getting much joy from following an extended trail of hints and eventually the solution itself… so we decided it was clearly meant for far cleverer puzzlers than us, and went back to playing with our other puzzles.

Dan had brought along his (half-sized) copy of Goh Pitt Khiam’s Numlock with a super valuable Israeli Scheckel secured in place… and it duly became the object of an arms race between Steve-the-destroyer-of all-things-orderly, and Dan, who doesn’t have OCD but is seriously considering a long-term relationship with it. They went back and forth many, many times over the course of the afternoon with Steve disassembling and reassembling it with the numbers in the wrong order, only for Dan to calmly open it up in about a third of the time and reorder them properly… somehow neither of them thought it made sense to concede and just leave it alone…

A couple of folks worked their way through Iwahara’s new Quaternary Box and one or two managed to find the second compartment in Bars Box III – so I know that one’s not broken – I’m just being more incompetent than usual…

Frank had to step out at some point in the afternoon so we played another fun round of hide the Kumiki – Steve had found another bunch of old Kumiki puzzles in his collection that he thought Frank would like, so he gave us each one to hide somewhere in Frank’s house… and then challenged Frank to find them all. Frank really loves this game – in fact he’s still playing last year’s round. [Editor’s note: in the week following NPP he found the Kumiki pig that I’d hidden in his dining room last year. The man is on fire…]

At one point Ali announced that it was time for the competition and produced a copy of his new NPP burr for everyone to solve – as a competition… virtually everyone solved their copy before I finally managed to work out just how I was being stupid and what might work a little better – finally managing to assembly the little bugger – only for Ali to present me with a giant sized version and ask me to repeat the process on the larger one… Frank had just done exactly that and discovered he’d assemble them in mirrored forms… it took me almost as long to assemble the second copy – not that sharpest brush on the line… or something. ;-)

The girls had been out painting pottery and shopping up a storm (and nomming cakey!) and when they returned we started prepping for dinner (because we were all famished by that stage – NOT!) – once again it was clear that there was going to be a huge spread, but before dinner, Frank announced there’d be an awards ceremony based on some secret challenges he’d given each one of us to do with Steve during the course of the day. This took Steve a little by surprise and he hadn’t really noticed anything too weird – we each got invited to tell Steve what we’d had to get him to do and in return for our successful achievement of our challenges, Frank awarded each of us with a ceremonial NPP Challenge medal… I had to get Steve to tell me his age and get him to fist-bump me twice (not really my style, but he was very obliging during our co-solve of Oskar’s Screw Pack), Gill had to get him to dance (Hokey Pokey obviously!), someone had to get him to make an animal noise - worryingly he did that entirely of his own accord, Mike had to get him to play rock, paper, scissors and so on… we all had a lot of fun with it – and medals!

After dinner Frank divided us into two teams and we competed in a head-to-head solve of an envelope escape… we came second…

There was a bunch more banter and solving and then it all got a bit too much for some of us… Tamsin took a bit of a nap with Chiquitito but her years of being an on-call doctor kicked in when Frank gently woke her and she jumped up and was fully awake in about 3 microseconds…

Everyone headed off to their respective Airbnb’s and we headed upstairs to bed.

Next morning Frank and Jo treated us to a massive breakfast fit for a king (or three!) before we met up with the rest of the gang at Lucardo in Rawtenstall for a couple of escape rooms. Claus for Concern turned out to be a LOT more puzzly than we’d thought it would be - and Corruption was really excellent – lots of surprising elements in the room that had us absolutely buzzing.

After we’d all finished there was the obligatory comparison of finishing times across the room and bonus points – before a team photo outside the rooms for posterity…

…after a few pretty torrid weeks in the office, that was an absolutely brilliant couple of days with some of my favourite friends – Thank you Frank and Jo for another awesome weekend!

Simple Lock 1

Simple by name… simple by nature?

Most definitely not!

I missed out on the first release of this puzzle a while back, but on Louis’ most excellent recommendation, I joined the waiting list and managed to grab a copy from a subsequent batch… and I’m rather glad I did.

It is an exceedingly handsome little beast – plenty of nicely brushed aluminium, a super-solid looking stainless-steel shackle and a conspicuously removable plate on the back. (The lock comes with a hex-tool and an instruction to only use it after fully solving the puzzle in order to see your serial number inscribed inside.)

The accompanying key actually fits in the keypath (great start!) and will actually turn (we’re two-for-two already!) and you may even be surprised when the shackle starts coming out (it’s all going swimmingly so far!), but there’s a rather large “but” in your pretty immediate future at this stage!

Roundabout now things go a little Pete Tong, and you may well find yourself picturing Ben, the creator of this little monster, having a laugh at your expense.

Somewhere along the obvious path you need to take, you will find yourself unable to turn around and head back for the safety of your starting position – game on… ready or not!

That whole bit of the journey takes mere seconds… the rest of it took me many, many weeks!

At various stages I had a shackle in one hand and a locked-up padlock with a key that wouldn’t budge in the other – in fact that was quite often the position.

There are some lovely discoveries and some very subtle little touches that had me barking up the wrong tree for an awfully long time. There’s a tool or two to be discovered (including some “where the heck did that come from?”!) and then a really long (‘twas for me!) journey of discovery to work out all of the steps required to get everything back to the starting position.

It's really an excellent puzzle from just the solve perspective - what makes it really mind-blowing IMHO is taking the back cover off and seeing just how elegant the innards are – there is zero over-complication anywhere. Every precisely shaped piece is there for a reason – some to allow you to do something, most to stop you from doing something.

Ultimately this puzzle’s design really earns its name – just don’t be fooled into thinking that the name will be descriptive of the solution in any way, shape or form!

Bravo Ben!

MPP XXXXVIII

(Yes, I know that’s not a real Roman Numeral…try and keep up!) 

MPP XXXXVIII was another rather select affair – a few of the usual suspects weren’t able to make this one and I ended up in the decidedly weird position of not having anyone staying for the weekend and heading down to the hall entirely on my own on the Saturday morning – it really felt quite weird!

I got there before anyone had arrived and set about getting the urn up and running, laying out the refreshments and setting up all the tables – I put up a couple of the traditional signs and then headed across to the shops to grabs some cold drinks and some fresh milk – good thing as Phil later discovered that the milk left in the fridge was somewhat beyond its best…

Sod’s Law dictates that while I was at the shops two loads of puzzlers had arrived, and George and Rox seemed to be packing or unpacking their luggage in the car park while Steve, Ali and Rich looked on – I didn’t ask and they didn’t offer… the mystery remains…

Inside the hall we unpacked some puzzles and began the usual banter, fiddling with puzzles, more banter and the occasional bit of friendly abuse, aka banter.

A couple of us had brought along a full set of our exchange puzzles so that anyone who hadn’t been at IPP 40 could experience our pain at not being able to solve quite a few of them; and perhaps solve one or two of them.

Dale had a rummage through the exchange puzzles and found a goodly number that interested him.

Kevin had brought along a huge number of recent Pelikan productions and several of us had a bash at some of them that we hadn’t had our grubby paws on yet. I reciprocated by encouraging him to have a bash at George Bell’s Another Broken Burr – a lovely little six-piece burr that might look like a “standard” diagonal burr when it’s properly assembled, a badly coloured diagonal burr when it’s not, and a really scary pile of pieces when it’s not assembled. It turns out there’s a sliding axis assembly for the wrong assembly, and the right assembly requires six pieces to be simultaneously assembled… Kevin loves a challenge after all… and after one or two false starts he was victorious, which is great because I can now store that puzzle assembled! (I’d had no luck trying to do that myself a few days earlier – so well done, and thanks Kevin!)

Kyle had brought along one of his new creations and Tamsin spent a while sitting next to me working her way through it – every now and then there’d be a delighted squeak as a new bit of progress was made – spoiler alert: she enjoyed it!

Phil had arrived with a few copies of his latest creation: a set of three dexterity puzzles beautifully machined out of chunks of brass – they had to be, didn’t they?! I’d already arranged to take a set and handed him some cash – mainly so that I could annoy visiting puzzlers – I’m really rubbish at dexterity puzzles and probably don’t stand a hope in all heck of ever solving them – especially after hearing how he’d struggled with them – Quigley will no doubt consider them all a mere child’s toy and complete them in minutes – in fact he may have even done that in the hall and completed them so quickly that I wasn’t even aware of him doing them. <I did subsequently try and solve them when I was taking some pics and managed to solve one out of the three… I’m going to have to try the other two again, not that I’m a proud man, but…>

Several folks enjoyed Andreas’ exchange, Swaptic by Andrew Crowell, before George tried to throw it at BurrTools and found himself asking a familiar question…

Quizbrix latest release, Vertigo, had several folks playing with Lego for a while – not a single bad word was uttered – everyone loves playing with Peleg’s latest design.

Several folks had a bash at solving Chinny’s Ze Tooth Fairy Puzzle – with some people finding some rather unconventional approaches to solving some of the steps and then finding themselves thoroughly out of sequence with things, finding tools with no apparent use having cooked an earlier step or two – Chinny’s puzzles never fail to put a huge smile on folks' faces – that never changes!

I embarrassed myself severely spending an absolute age totally failing to solve Ali’s copy of his Bolt From the Blue in front of him… only to be told that Mike had just solved my copy of the bolt without any issues – I’d been hoping my copy was somehow defective and that it wasn’t merely a case of the solver being defective – turned out ‘twas. Hey ho… onwards and… somewhere…

Being a smaller bunch – about 13 of us, I think – there seemed to be more time for chatting with everyone and chillin’ with puzzles – no that is not a euphemism!

I managed to disappoint Rox (and no doubt one or two others, including myself!) at lunch time when the deli had just run out of pig buns when we got there – mental note: must leave earlier for lunch next time! With my staple not being available I opted for a curry sausage roll, which turned out to be delicious, so all was not entirely lost! There was a smattering of some wonderfully unhealthy pickings around the various lunch tables – kebab-man I’m looking at you! – and even some really healthy choices – puzzlers are an interesting mix!

In the afternoon I spent a while watching Steve playing with Chinny’s exchange puzzle and seemingly trying to play a tune on some poor unsuspecting moles’ heads for some reason. Possibly it was just that he had the wrong tune, but the puzzle didn’t magically open – suggestions for the right tune on a postcard to Steve please.

I managed to give away a few copies of my exchange and the Monkeys had copies of their exchanges and one or two other recent goodies available for sale at most reasonable prices.

There was a fair bit of fiddling with Rik’s exchange, albeit not a lot of progress beyond the predicted first stage of the solve… I got lucky with that one and solved it during the preceding week – I had a line of thought and managed to make elements of it start working and then bashed through to the final solution – definitely a bit sneaky!

Dmitry’s Third Wheel got a LOT of attention across a couple of copies, and to my knowledge nobody managed a solve at MPP, although I’m pretty sure that Ali has subsequently solved it… the rest of us mortals struggle on… Nobody got anywhere at all on Brian’s exchange… that one’s going to go down in history as a mean bastard! (The puzzle…)

Somewhere before six o’clock we packed up the hall, bid some folks farewell and then headed off to my place for the traditional fish supper, only this one turned out to be a little less traditional: the weather on the afternoon was absolutely wonderful, so Gill was sitting out on the deck making one of her scrappy wreaths and a few folks ended up sitting around the table chatting with her… until pretty much everyone was outside around the table just chilling and chatting, with nary a puzzle in sight…

We had supper out there, and chatted some more and literally just ended up chatting and laughing out on the deck for the rest of the evening… until folks needed to head home – a really lovely end to a super day’s puzzling with friends, once again – thanks for another memorable MPP, folks!