Doog’s Single Barrelled Side By Side

OK, so this is a bit embarrassing… I’ve been struggling with the final step on this box for a very long time… almost since I got the box from Doog in Assisi – and that was several months ago!

With this box, Doog announced that he was challenging himself to push his design and workmanship to the next level – which is quite a statement given that I’ve never heard anyone complain about either the novelty of his designs or the functioning of his mechanism. Sure, some of his earlier boxes might have looked a little rustic, but that very element conned me into woefully underestimating their puzzling – and when I did solve them, I had not only found a lot of respect for Doog’s ingenuity, but also his craftsmanship.

I really liked it when he began putting nice wooden veneer on the outside of his puzzles (I admit it, I’m shallow!) so when he announces he’s stepping up a(nother) level, I’m all in!

The name on this one’s a neat allusion to one of the locking mechanisms – usually a single-barrelled thing couldn’t possibly be a side-by-side, but this one manages it.

The chassis is (very neatly!) constructed of plywood making it incredibly stable. It’s dressed up in some beautiful veneer and it appears to have three sections to it, with the top one having three aluminium rods peering out of it. There are a couple more bolts and rods on the sides and that’s about all you have to start off…

Finding the first tool isn’t too challenging and finding a use for it is also reasonably straight-forward. That may lead to another discovery or two but then you may find yourself wanting for a little while…

The next discovery is terrific because it really works against the puzzler on a couple of levels at the same time. Crack that one and you’re gifted the mother-load of bits and pieces which you must somehow use to defeat the final set of locks…

…and this is the part that had me scratching my head for months… not because the mechanism is finicky or things required “encouragement” – they do not – on both accounts! Doog’s even tried to be helpful with some of the breadcrumbs he’s sprinkled around – I was just thinking on altogether the wrong wavelength – and as I kept trying to do the wrong things, I found my way consistently barred… I even tried brute-forcing that part of the solve and failed abysmally.

I watched Rich blast through it and he tried to be helpful by telling me to trust Doog, but I couldn’t make enough sense of the breadcrumbs… and thus it remained until Louis solved it and said something differently which made me realise just how much I’d been overcomplicating things… and so yesterday, after having this box on my desk-of-shame for months, I took it out and worked through the solve properly… and it was glorious – the precision on the final locks is incredible.

Doog said he wanted to push his workmanship to the next level – I reckon job done mate! It’s sublime. (And I’m really sorry I overcomplicated it and it took me so long to finally solve it myself!)

MPP IIXIIXIIXIIXIIXII

Normal service is resumed: Louis and Mieke fly in on Friday evening and we get a few hours to catch up on stuff before a few of us feel the need for some sleep – I set up Louis in the study with a line of puzzles and leave him puzzling while I go and crash.

Next morning a good number of them have shifted position; and state – Louis has triumphed… we grab some breakfast and pack up the car before heading down to the hall via the shops to grab the drinks and milk for the day… where we find Ali grabbing himself some breakfast.

Down at the hall there’s already a few puzzlers waiting in the parking lot where it’s clear we aren’t sharing the facilities with the antenatal group this time so there’s more parking for puzzlers.

I open up the hall and everyone lends a hand to drag all the stuff inside and get the tables and chairs set up… the boiler takes a while to get the water up to temperature so one or two cups of lukewarm coffee are made before the good stuff comes online. I wait patiently and it’s plenty warm enough.

I’ve printed off a couple of sets of George Bell and Nan Ma’s co-ordinate motion dodecahedron assembly kits and there’s some early interest in them. A few folks end up having a bash at some of the assembly challenges with Robin coming out on top with a pair of assembled dodeca’s from a single set… he’s definitely earned his set! The others appear to have found a home as well although I suspect someone may not have taken the accompanying paperwork with the write-up and challenges… you can grab a copy off Printables if you need it.

Alan Lunsford (he of brilliant small 3D-printed SD puzzles-fame) had recently published a few TIC designs so I couldn’t resist trying them out myself, and having done that, decided I should print off ten copies of each to give away – they’re great designs: not many pieces – it’s pretty clear where everything needs to end up, it’s just the getting them there that takes a little bit of Think(c). They turned out to be very popular!

I’d also taken along my Puzzle Potato Houdini Box and the new Jesse Born Sq_d puzzle… the former hooks people beautifully with the first (un-)locking mechanism and it’s a romp from there through – I tended to keep an eye on their progress and nudge them into focusing on the right place from time to time to ensure enjoyment. SQ_d had a few challengers as well and the menacing voice got exercised several times over the day with the treasure popping out at least a couple of times.

Carlos came back for a second visit, bringing along his son Lewis this time… the lad threw himself into a bunch of different sorts of puzzles and seemed to be having a whale of a time – according to Carlos afterwards he’s sold and will definitely be back for more – excellent! Another new convert… :-)

Carlos had brought along a number of different animal-shaped puzzles that Steve spent a while playing with and at the end of the afternoon Carlos gifted me a burr he’d designed where the pieces each break down into a number of smaller bits… a nice idea well implemented as the bits all stay together when the burr is assembled but will spontaneously disassemble once the burr is taken apart… some dexterity required.

Pelikan’s Cabinet from their previous release proved to be a very popular plaything – the first drawer’s nice but everyone absolutely loves the second drawer! IYKYK :-)

I’d taken my copy of I Need My Lunch along and got another nudge from Ali on what to try next… I’m glad I did because there’s no way I’d have thought of trying that… I made a little more progress that day but ended up hitting another brick wall which remained solidly in place until Louis gave me some coaching the next morning… (No, I’m not ashamed – that thing is INCREDIBLE!)

The orderly horde headed up to the main road for pig rolls (etc.) and I managed to pick up some meat for the braai we were planning for Sunday afternoon with the Coolens. The pig rolls were up to their usual standards and the banter in the room next door was typically dire so we all enjoyed ourselves.

Kevin brought along another bunch of imminent Pelikan puzzles for our enjoyment and I decided that I definitely needed a copy of the new Minima from Volker…

The Entity Containment Device had a good playing with but I was surprised that the assembled experts didn’t just power straight through it… everyone was pretty complimentary of the quality of the puzzles and the challenge they offered so I suspect that Nothing Puzzles will find a welcoming audience for their future puzzles.

Lewis (E) arrived just after lunchtime to personally deliver a handful of Pin the Pebbles and settled down for some puzzling and banter – he seemed to be enjoying himself so hopefully he’ll become a regular!

Steve and Ali were passing around a prototype of a new puzzle from Doog – a rectangular lump of aluminium with a protruding brass pin that appeared to be sprung… several of us had a good old try on it and got literally nowhere. Rich did manage to make some progress although I found it very straight-forward to undo all of his progress and then got absolutely nowhere. Louis spent a while with it and duly whipped out the brass rod before he and the monkeys disappeared off to a quieter part of the establishment for a discussion / debrief / debugging. When Doog asked me how I’d got on the next day he seemed disappointed that I hadn’t solved it but not surprised that Louis had…

Robin spent a good chunk of the afternoon assembling what appeared to be a complex magnetic assembly – no idea what the final assembly will look like but it’s made up of a huge number of small plastic bits with a shed-load of magnets glued into them… most of the magnets ended up glued in place, albeit by the end of the day he had accumulated a fair amount of superglue on both his hands and the table – the price of art, eh?

When we were down to the stayers, we tidied up the hall and headed up to Puzzling Times HQ for more puzzling and pizzas. (It turns out I’m lazy and Domino’s will deliver – that and my old mate no longer runs the fish and chip shop and it’s not the same anymore…)

Several of the treasures came out to play with the Clutch Box and the Cricket Bat both getting a good playing with… along with a large number of interesting Karakuri boxes. One of Chinny’s old pencil specials (La Boomba!) get’s an outing but some of the hot glue seems to have given up over the intervening years so it’s not quite as challenging a puzzle as it once was… the batteries have also faded so the boom wasn’t there either. Louis takes it in hand on Sunday and whips it back into shape with the help of a bit more fresh glue and some new batteries and it’s hopefully ready for another decade’s punishment.

There’s the traditional gathering in the kitchen to put the entire world to rights and we feel like we’ve managed to reset things sufficiently until the next MPP is due to roll around…

The travellers leave at a suitably modest time and I turf out some of the locals when Gill decides she’s heading off to bed as we’ve all had a pretty long day, and Gill and I are still getting over the last dregs of our respective colds…

I set Louis up with a pile of puzzles and head off to bed myself.

Next morning sees more of the puzzles solved and after a nice chatty breakfast Louis and I throw ourselves into the puzzles once more…

I get some encouragement on my T15 where I’ve been stuck for a while and Louis tells me I’m doing all the right things… so I try again and then give it one almighty yank and find the shackle opening – there is a neat and tidy technique but I suspect that most folks are going to use the yank and hope approach at that point.

I switch to I Need My Lunch and get the occasional bit of encouragement or nudging in the right direction and manage to finally find my lunch – it’s an incredible puzzle and I’m going to need to write more about it at some point, but for now it remains only half solved – I can’t find how to start the reset… again, if you know, you know…

I braaied for lunch and we sat outside to enjoy the fruits of my burning only for the rain to start and for us to have to scuttle inside to avoid a drenching.

A few more hours puzzling before I dropped the visitors at the airport to start their journey homeward.

It was brilliant getting to spend time with my puzzling mates and also to get the excuse to spend a good chunk of time playing with puzzles with my friends… life is good!

 

Entity Containment Device trilogy

[I have ZERO affiliation with Nothing Puzzles - I just like their work!] 

A while back I decided to take a bit of a punt on a Kickstarter from a new puzzle designer Down Under called Nothing Puzzles. The Entity Containment Device trilogy was pitched as a set of related puzzles leading to a final lock – it sounded intriguing enough at the time and the mock-ups looked pretty decent, so I thought “Why not?!!” Along the way a couple of fidget toys were added into the mix and the whole thing duly arrived a few weeks ago.

I was very impressed with the packaging – the outer carboard box looks brilliant and protects things in transit and inside there’s a custom-printed frame that supports all of the puzzles and stops them from bashing into one another during their postal adventures… everything arrived looking neat and tidy in their proper spots.

I got to spend a couple of hours playing through them recently and really enjoyed them… each of the puzzles is very nicely 3D printed and makes use of quite a lot of hardware to connect things and provide some puzzly elements… the printing is top-notch and the guys haven’t stinted on quality anywhere. Each of the puzzles has a good solid heft to it that inspires confidence and you know that things are just going to work properly when you’ve found the right way to attack each element of the series.

The three initial elements all stand on their own and can be tackled in any order. I chose to tackle them in numerical order just because I could, not due to any form of OCD whatsoever(!).

Each of the puzzles provides a really great solve journey: from trying to find anything that moves initially, then trying to get that to be vaguely useful, invariably finding some tools, some of which are obviously quite tool-y and some that may well be a little disguised, before dramatically disassembling things and wondering how the heck you’re going to remember where everything came from and in what order.

By the time you solve each of them you will have a goodly pile of pieces and a very clear key piece for that final lock. Collect enough of those and you can unlock the final lock and uncover a little unsettling twist in the tail… that’s not at all sinister.

One of the puzzles does an interesting little dance and sways this way and that while you’re manipulating things – it might feel a little chaotic but when you get it all open, I defy you not to marvel at the extent of the overengineering in there to make sure that everything stays properly in its lane and works just perfectly. The guys have done an excellent job of designing a fun set of puzzles and then properly overengineering things so that they’re going to carry on working perfectly through many, many rounds of solving.

I’m very glad I took a punt on these and will definitely be hopping on their next Kickstarter project.