DCD 2026

The Dutch Cube Day has become a firm fixture on our puzzling calendar and Ali’s offered to drive across again this year, so we end up with a pretty full truck-load making the trek down to the chunnel and then up to The Hague on Friday. The traffic is kind and the sat-nav helps us avoid the inevitable snarl-up around Antwerp so we get to the hotel around 6 in the evening. We find Stephan checking in at the same time and he ends up joining us in the hotel bar for some puzzling and libations after we’ve had a rather nice dinner. (Thanks Steve!) We’ve had a long day in the car and Stephan had to endure flight delays so we end up heading to bed at a reasonably sensible hour.

Next morning we have a relaxed breakfast and an hour or two chilling in the hotel until Louis arrives with a plan that sees us head off in the rough direction of Rob’s place intending to grab some lunch vaguely nearby… in the end we stumble across a Turkish greasy-spoon where they gladly make up a table for six and we enjoy an unexpectedly tasty lunch. By the time we finish lunch it’s more or less time to head to Rob’s place so we hop in the cars and seek to solve the navigate-to-Rob’s-place-puzzle – made slightly harder by Google maps not understanding the difference between a road and a pedestrian walkway/staircase. We engage puzzle-brains and manage to figure out where we need to get to and where we might be able to park – neither being a trivial puzzle!

Rob greets us downstairs and we head up to his living room and get out the puzzles we’re keen to inflict on one another. Yaccine’s brought along a set of puzzles from a Japanese designer that most of us haven’t seen before so we all end up having a bash at one or more of them. Wil brings out a new secret opening box in the shape of a clock from Jean-Claude that I manage to get part of the way through before hitting a proverbial brick wall – it’s a nice-looking thing and I end up buying a copy from him the next day.

Clive entertains us with his storytelling – this time how his wife gets off scot-free in spite of trying to run him over and breaking all sorts of bones in the process..  Clive is a very good storyteller!

I’ve brought along my copy of Volker’s Frau L and it’s generating a reputation for being a bit of a bastard (I'm she's positively lovely!) – several people end up spending many hours trying to solve it all without success and it’s only when Ivan manages to dredge up enough recollection of his solve that he finally manages to put us out of our misery. Steve takes charge of the solved puzzle and then duly tips out the pieces on Rob’s kitchen counter… the next day he manages to narrow things down sufficiently to be able to recreate the solution and several of us breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Rob orders the customary large pile of pizzas and there’s more than enough for everyone even though Rob thought he was ordering larger pizzas than actually appeared.

The UK-gang heads off to a nearby escape room with Louis for our evening challenge. Jason’s Legacy isn’t the newest escape room but it’s still getting darn good reviews and it’s not hard to see why – it’s an excellently immersive experience inside a double-storey house that’s been constructed inside what I suspect was a large industrial space. There are very few combination locks and ample use of NFC tags tracking where objects are being placed before magic just happens…  we have hints appearing a couple of times where our gamesmasters might be getting a bit worried about our lack of progress but we do a pretty decent job of working through the puzzles and completing the room… we all agreed it has a well-earned reputation.

We head back to the hotel bar where we find a whole bunch more puzzlers have arrived and they’re all furiously puzzling away – I suspect that our arrival both reduced the puzzling effectiveness score and increased the noise levels – but we had fun!

We play for a while and make sure that we all use up our free drinks vouchers (who needs clean towels?!) before making breakfasting and travel arrangements for the big day.

On Sunday morning we grab breakfast and head off toward Sint Maartens where we manage to find the secret new entrance. Having navigated that we load up the elevator with a trolley-full of puzzles and head up to the library which will be our venue for the day. There’s already a huge gaggle of puzzlers there and the monkeys manage to find a table in the corner to lay out their wares: they have their recent productions along with several crates of puzzles that they’re trying to get into a new home. I witness several amusing interchanges between Steve and sundry puzzlers as he attempted to bargain them down on their offers – invariably catching them off balance initially but always putting a smile on their faces… everyone ended up happy.

I grab a copy of Jack’s latest puzzle box (Jack asked me not to refer to his pricing as ridiculous again, so henceforth I will need to refer to it as offering exceptionally good value for money!) and also a copy of Twinkle – his current record-holding high level 18-piece burr which I freely admit I’m probably never going to take apart so he promises to send me the BurrTools file for it… I’m probably going to have to take it apart now, aren’t I?)

I spend a little while chatting to Arie and secure a lovely ball assembly in 5 colourful woods that I’m very glad I’ll be able to transport home fully assembled given it took Arie about four hours to assemble each of the two copies he had for sale. From his description this one doesn’t hold together very well until right near the end of the process.

Around lunchtime a few of us head up to the supermarket to grab some lunch – I opt for something that has cheese wrapped in pastry (how can you go wrong with that?!) but some of the others opt for something far more healthy… their loss!

Back at the school we find out that Mickey D’s was also a popular choice for lunch… turns out that not getting a lunch supplied as part of the DCD organisation isn’t really much of a hindrance to determined puzzlers!

The afternoon sees the usual lectures in a nearby classroom with George and Rox updating on the WPC and IPP43 (including several warnings to all who would listen not to ever offer to host an IPP along with some of George’s more philosophical musings), Sjaak gave us a talk on the development of his commercial sphere-packing puzzle and then Rob delivered his usual review of some of the IPP exchanges with Toby playing the role of Diniar this year.

When I wandered past Jan Willem’s table I was somewhat gob-smacked to see three little Ninomiya crates still desperate to find a home so after a short chat to share our surprise, I gave him pretty much the rest of my euros in return for re-homing them.

I end up acquiring a couple more puzzles from Wil just so that my case isn’t too empty on the way home and then things start winding down and we all lend a hand to turn the classrooms back into actual classrooms and the library back into a functioning space for the kids the next day.

Louis does an excellent job of rounding up takers for our traditional Chinese dinner after DCD only to discover that won’t be an option this year so we pivot to eating at the hotel restaurant that does an excellent job of catering for a table of about 20-odd puzzlers (yes, that hyphen is optional, isn’t it?). The puzzles continue to flow and the food is great – I can’t rate the burgers highly enough – I really enjoy mine!

Folks start drifting off to catch planes, trains and automobiles home until there’s a hardy few who’re all only leaving the next day… when I call it a night I leave Frederic’s anti-slide puzzle on the to-be-solved pile as it’s stubbornly resisted all attempts at solving all weekend… and when I retrieve it the next morning I find out it has retained it’s unbeaten record… some more Think (c) may be required.

I pack up my stuff in the hotel room and reckon that I’m definitely going home with less than I came with, although the football-sized ball in the back of Ali’s truck probably suggests otherwise.

Breakfast sees us saying our final goodbyes to puzzlers we won’t see for weeks (some of them are coming to our next MPP) or months (King’s Day or an IPP) before we load up the truck one more time and hit the road.

Ali does his normal sterling job of taking care of all of the driving, with several stops to let everyone unfold themselves and stretch our legs or grab something to eat. We make great time and end up back at Ali’s place before 4pm which allows Frank and I to get back to my place around six pm… earlier than we’d expected.

Another cracking weekend road trip with my mates… thanks especially to Ali for doing all of the driving and Steve for keeping us amused and buying us dinner… I largely failed to sponsor anything over the course of the weekend – in spite of trying – thank you guys!

Carlos’ FrankenBurr

Every now and then kind puzzlers give me puzzling gifts and while I’m always grateful, sometimes I think they need to blogged about as well.

Carlos recently started joining us at MPP and at the end of the last MPP Carlos gave me a copy of one of his latest designs that I’ve dubbed Carlos’ Frankenburr because he hadn’t named it yet. (I’m sure he’s going to make sure that he names his future designs himself now! :-) )

This one started out life as a reasonably standard Burr #305 from Bill Cutler. Carlos then decided it should be made a little more interesting and duly proceeded to chop each of the burr pieces into a series of interlocking pieces that each has a specific assembly sequence… and not only that, those bits will all hold together properly when fully assembled! (That required a bit of thought, no doubt!)  

It makes for a reasonably straightforward disassembly providing a lovely pile of unique pieces in six distinct colours. Assembly isn’t a chore and each piece seems to have it’s own personality. Some of them have an obvious place to start to work out where the individual little bits go, but more often than not you’re going to find yourself having to backtrack and start somewhere else once you’ve determined where things need to go.

It’s a really fun puzzle and nice idea, well implemented.

Thanks a stack, Carlos! 

 

Minima Ronde

I wonder if Frederic Boucher had any idea just how ubiquitous his Minima form-factor would become when he started toying with his first few designs. It’s seen some truly mind-blowing “simple” packing puzzles that are anything but straight-forward from Frederic himself… then he’s given us some wonderfully complicated sequential discovery puzzles. And then he’s also invited a bunch of other designers onto the bandwagon to bring us their take on the 2*2*3 space.

Volker Latussek had already dabbled in the space with Minima Flop using standard cubie-pieces and decided to have another bash with pieces that each have one full cubie and two half cubies. Six such pieces will neatly fill the standard Minima box and then some judiciously carved holes will turn it into a rather neat little puzzle.

As with all of Volker’s puzzles, the shipping configuration is designed to tease the puzzler and this one comes with an interesting little challenge – you can’t just shake the pieces out of the box… so it begins.

Retrieve the pieces and you can fiddle around with them outside the box and get to know them a little… you’ll spot that some of them are handed-copies and that will restrict the potential assemblies a fair bit.

Having found an assembly, reverse-engineering how the heck you can get them into the box is a wonderful challenge. I really enjoyed this bit of the solve – Volker’s given you a whole bunch of holes and it turns out that every single one of them is important… there’s a wonderfully convoluted series of moves required to get everything inside and quite often you’re having to fiddle around with the order of insertion because your initial assumptions are going to be proved wrong!

I found myself stopped in my tracks a few times as I had to reassess and find a way around something that seemed impossible… for six little pieces, this one packs a whole lot of puzzling and some ingenious moves to get everything in just the right spot.

Another superb challenge added to the canon!

Pluredro House

Juno has taken it upon himself to fix the Housing Crisis by making an affordable starter home available for sale. As you’d expect it’s a neat little timber-framed number and it contains a number of rather puzzling features.

I placed my order and realising it was due to arrive while we were away in Italy, I asked Yukari to post my copy over to Steve’s place as there was going to be someone in residence while we were all enjoying the heatwave (and some Puzzling Time) in Italy. It arrived safe and sound and then Steve duly delivered it to me at the next MPP…

Rich had a bash at it that evening and made a modest amount of progress before resetting it for me… I duly threw myself into it and made a similarly modest amount of progress before hitting a brick wall, which is odd for a timber-framed house.

The first few steps flowed beautifully, but then there just seemed to be no way to progress…

I did the obvious things of going back to the start and then retracing my steps (even though I needed to cheat a bit in there – if you know… you know) but that yielded no further enlightenment… even trying it under a different star sign yielded no noticeable changes in outcome or indeed any further progress… I remained stuck for quite some time…

Now I should probably have expected this – Juno did warn us that he thought this puzzle was quite a bit harder than his previous sequential discovery puzzles. He also said that he’d taken pity on us lowly puzzlers and included a visual hint for the particularly contentious step in the solve… and I knew that I was even at that step yet!

Puzzles are getting harder and I’m getting slower in the brain department – that’s probably not a great combination.

When the next MPP rolled around a few folks spent a good deal of time on the House and eventually managed to blast through the brick wall – and several other not insignificant obstacles thereafter. Several far better puzzlers triumphed over the House and so the following day, complete with my puzzle guru nearby, I tackled it once more – this time with a handy source or encouragement and nudgings on tap.

Getting past the first brick wall was helped by engaging a little bit of Think (c) – mainly along the lines of what the heck could be stopping me and how could I get around it…? The next few steps where a rollocking ride with progress seeming to flow until I got to the “contentious” step – but here I found Juno’s visual clue to be spot on and helpful with things just magically all lining up and things just seeming to magically happen.

At some point we find ourselves having moved into a single-storey house and turning it into a double-storey – but the fun really comes when you – cue thick cockney accent - blow the bluddy roof off it.

The locks and their tools are classic Juno – but don’t be lulled into thinking you can set your tools aside once you’ve used them – some of them are somewhat multi-functional!

This one’s definitely a step up on the hardness scale  - a few things are reasonably blind but do ultimately yield to the right amount of Think (c) – sadly my stores of the latter seem to be depleting rapidly as I age!

Juno’s House has probably provided the most puzzling value for money I’ve had recently – and still it looks like a mere child’s toy. There is a proper shed-load of puzzling crammed in there though, all of it with well thought-out design and perfect tolerances… if it’s not working, it’s because you’re not doing the right thing, not because anything’s a bit finicky!

An excellent starter home for the well-seasoned puzzler!