Zodiac

Doog and Radek are at it again… this time their latest Demonticon is delivered safely trapped inside a cage, for our safety, presumably… and then the cage is neatly ensconced inside a handsome leather carrier.

From his backstory we suspect that Zodiac isn’t as malicious as his namesake, although his use of similar cryptograms that you’ll come across during the solve might suggest he’s not quite going to turn out to be the warm and cuddly type. The backstory invites us to negotiate four guards in order to release Zodiac from prison and then look deep into his soul to find out who he needs to see to get back on the right path.

Zodiac definitely looks the part of an evil mastermind with a devilish grin exposing a large gold false tooth... and a pair of mesmerising eyes inviting you in. The cage he’s trapped in turns out to be reasonably impenetrable – there’s some sort of locking mechanism in the base – but it won’t budge for love nor money… believe me, I tried both!

I ended up spending a heck of a long time trying to find a way into that little prison cell… I generated theories of what I wanted to do and then found myself totally unable to execute any of them, either because I couldn’t reach something I thought would be helpful, or because I didn’t have the right tool, or indeed because my theory turned out to be total rubbish!

After I’d been at it for a couple of days, Doog and Radek both reached out to me separately and asked me what I thought of Zodiac and I had to reply - somewhat embarrassed - that I had yet to even get Zodiac out of jail… I suspect the lads enjoyed hearing that.  :-)

Three days after I’d started, I investigated something I’d been largely ignoring up to that point and a whole new world opened up to me… all of a sudden I was actually able to do some physical puzzling and after a fair amount of scrabbling around I managed to finally free Zodiac on day three – insert own derogatory comment here – I deserve it!

With Zodiac out of the cell I really enjoyed the next few phases of puzzling – there’s a wonderful familiarity in a couple of the aspects of the solve and then there are several totally original little bits… there’s a great progression as you work through the solve and you can sense Doog peering over your shoulder and getting a kick out of every time you find yourself getting stopped in your tracks.

There’s a really brilliant part of the solution where something behaves in a somewhat bewildering fashion, until you completely solve that particular element and you can see what was going on –it’s all wonderfully elegant in its implementation, but thoroughly baffling until you realise what’s going on in there…

If you’re anything like me you’ll need to be reminded that your goal was to find who Zodiac needed to see to get him back on the right path – you might easily overlook that part of the challenge and in so doing rob yourself of a couple of extra layers on this veritable onion of a puzzle.

That last bit combines several elements rather neatly to add a fun additional challenge. Don’t forget about it!

Zodiac is definitely a great addition to the family – the prison added a significant extra degree of puzzling for me – and the extra challenge at the end ties everything together rather nicely. The meat of the Demonticon puzzle itself is great fun and discovering the bits and pieces and little easter eggs inside Zodiac’s head is a treat.

I loved it, even if I was well-embarrassed by how long it took me to release Zodiac from jail!

Bring on the next one, guys!!

Fáfnir’s Fortress

Having recently really enjoyed Chained Key from Luke Waier, I was intrigued to spot an impending offering from Luke in the form of a little castle…

I signed up for the pre-order and it arrived just before Christmas, so in classic Walker-style it went under the Christmas tree and I got to open it a few days after Christmas when we got back home…

…and I wasn’t that surprised when I saw folks nominating it as one of their Best Finds of 2024 at our annual EPP gathering – it’s pretty darn good!

Luke’s given this puzzle a lovely backstory rooted in Norse mythology and invites you to “Find the Sword of Sigurd, slay (remove) the dragon Fáfnir and reclaim the stolen treasure. But beware of Fáfnir’s tricks…” – you know that you’re dealing with a sequential discovery puzzle (Luke has form on those!) and the objective makes it sound like it’s going to be quite a journey…

And it is!

First thing you’re going to notice about the fortress is that it’s heavier than you’re imagining it to be… it has a solid heft to it and nothing ever feels delicate, as some 3D printed bits can sometimes be… he’s chosen a nice matte filament and he hasn’t been stingy with his infill settings – oh, and there’s probably quite a lot of hardware inside there as well… and something that rattles…

Starting the solve there are a couple of little windows that tease views of something shiny inside – there are a few screws in the base, but alas none of them merely finger tight, and one or two other potentially interesting things...

Start solving proper and you’re straight into tool-finding territory – and if you’re lucky you might recognise potential uses for some of those tools, but trust me when I say this, you’re definitely going to have to get very creative to find a way forward – several times on this solve I found myself examining the tools at my disposal and imagining what I could possibly want to do next, and coming up blank… this one is going to challenge you to review all of your assumptions, and really test the heck out of them! I guarantee you’re going to find some of them don’t hold water!

At one point you might well be tempted to think that you’re finished – at that point I would suggest you shake the fortress from side to side and if there’s still something knocking about inside there, I’d suggest asking yourself why that might be… and then get back to solving!

When you are finished, you will know! ;-)

Luke has crammed an incredible amount of puzzling into a very small package and taught us to use some tools in a totally new way – not many puzzles still manage to do that today and Luke’s definitely done that in spades with Fáfnir’s Fortress.

Sadly this was a limited run of 100 copies and they’re all sold, so if you want to play with one, you’re going to have to borrow one from a mate, grab one from an auction site or toddle along to a nearby puzzle party and play with one there – either way, you’ll thank me!

Solution to the Christmas 2024 Puzzle

Yikes – I guess I made that one too hard! I got a grand total of two correct entries… the first one a little over an hour after the puzzle was posted, and the next one a few hours later… Mike showed some workings (with some traces of a few correct answers, and Brett showed me a picture of his workstation with one of the answers below his monitor… but neither submitted an answer).

... so what’s the answer then?

First off, you needed to solve the clues to some well-known(?) puzzles, so let’s do that…

Brian's tardis (2! Or 4! Or 9! For that matter…)	Telephone Box
Chambers, Rossetti & Stevens did this one (2!)	Loris
Dic's perforated pod	Holey Box Packing Puzzle
Diniar's clear box with red and blue bits inside it…	Sliding Tetris
Enright's second homage to a coin operated battle	Ms. Pack-Man
Frank's STPB (3!)	Simple Three Piece Burr
Gain's  attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one… (9!)	Superstrings
Hunter's steel orb of wonder	Venn Puzzle
Iwahiro's uneven one (2! Or 3!)	ODD Puzzle
Jerry's hanky (7!)	Mischief
Kosticks' bevelled (dimpled) box	Chamfered Cube
Markus' preposterous pachyderm prom (3!)	Crazy Elephant Dance
Miyamoto-san's whimsical strolling beetle	Walk of Ladybug
Robrecht's crypto conundrum (7!)	Bitcoin Maze
Stickman #18	Sphere Puzzlebox
The one BY made in PNGR where GPK went one better than BC	Ternary Burr
The one where GPK invites you to place bindings in a box (5!)	Chain-Store
Toulouzas' terrific table (5!)	Xenia Table Puzzlebox
Vesa's most murderous mirror mystery (IMHO) (10!)	Symmetrick
Volker does one for the little people	Euklid for Kids
What happens when Brian puts Piet's classic inside a diagonal burr (2!)	Insoma

Some of those would probably have just been obvious or easy to look up (13 and 16 respectively) and some may have required a bit more work (11?)…

OK so what were those numbers in brackets on some of the clues? – Well usually they’d clue the length of a crossword answer, but these have an exclamation mark, and some of the clues don’t have a number at all so this must be something else… now if you’ve solved the first clue, there’s a big clue to the numbers: did you spot that the 2^nd, 4^th and 9^th characters of the answer are all e’s… so extract those letters… and for the clues without a number, take the obvious one: the first letter of the answer.

…that gives you a string of letters that doesn’t appear very useful…

Now you might have noticed that the clues are listed in alphabetical order – something I did deliberately to throw you off – so how do you sensibly unscramble the letters?

Notice the italics in the flavour text? Referring to a conundrum competition – turns out there’s a rather well-known one each year, and it turns out that every one of these puzzles has been entered in the Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition – you might have spotted that in your research to find some of the answers, I guess… each puzzle can only be entered once, so there’ll be a unique year for each puzzle, and that gives you the ordering:

w	2001	Walk of Ladybug	Miyamoto-san's whimsical strolling beetle
h	2002	Holey Box Packing Puzzle	Dic's perforated pod
o	2003	Loris	Chambers, Rossetti & Stevens did this one (2!)
n	2004	Insoma	What happens when Brian puts Piet's classic inside a diagonal burr (2!)
a	2005	Crazy Elephant Dance	Markus' preposterous pachyderm prom (3!)
m	2006	Simple Three Piece Burr	Frank's STPB (3!)
e	2007	Telephone Box	Brian's Tardis (2! Or 4! Or 9! For that matter…)
d	2008	ODD Puzzle	Iwahiro's uneven one (2! Or 3!)
s	2009	Sphere Puzzlebox	Stickman #18
t	2010	Ternary Burr	The one BY made in PNGR where GPK went one better than BC
i	2011	Superstrings	Gain's attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one… (9!)
c	2012	Chamfered Cube	Kosticks' bevelled (dimpled) box
k	2013	Symmetrick	Vesa's most murderous mirror mystery (IMHO) (10!)
m	2014	Ms. Pack-Man	Enright's second homage to a coin operated battle
a	2015	Xenia Table Puzzlebox	Toulouzas' terrific table (5!)
n	2016	Chain-Store	…the one where GPK invites you to place bindings in a box (5!)
s	2017	Sliding Tetris	Diniar's clear box with red and blue bits inside it…
e	2018	Mischief	Jerry's hanky (7!)
v	2019	Venn Puzzle	Hunter's steel orb of wonder
e	2020	Euklid for Kids	Volker does one for the little people
n	2021	Bitcoin Maze	Robrecht's crypto conundrum (7!)

…now the extracted letters give you WHO NAMED STICKMAN SEVEN – and a bit more Googling (or a visit to http://www.stickmanpuzzlebox.com/stickman-puzzle-gallery.html) will confirm that Nick Baxter named Stickman Puzzlebox #7 the Beast Box.

Thanks a stack to Nick for test solving it for me (well, I couldn’t let him play, could I!) and congratulations to Brendan Perez for sending me the following limerick an hour and eleven minutes after it went up:

To solve Walker's puzzle in rhyme

I've solved his questions taken in lines

You sort by the year

In which they appear

Nick Baxter's the answer this time.

 

Kudos too to Bill and Scarlet who’s haiku arrived a few hours later:

Puzzle pieces dance

Nick Baxter sees the chaos

Stickman builds the beast

 

I’ll be sending off something puzzling to you guys in due course (as soon as I’ve procured something!)

Next year I’ll make it easier… maybe. :-)