Fire

 Sorry, it’s been a little quiet around here recently – you see I’ve been spending quite a lot of time on another puzzling-related project that has literally been soaking up all the spare time I’ve had recently. That’s meant I haven’t been able to spend much time puzzling, let alone blogging about puzzling…

I did manage to make an exception for one puzzle about a week or two back, and it’s definitely worth telling you about.

My mate Steve’s been teasing us at MPPs for ages with mock-ups and prototypes of a new puzzle that he was calling Fire – the 3D-printed conical prototype looked interesting but it was hard to tell what it would be like as a puzzle because one of the crucial bits wasn’t in there – so it didn’t work as a puzzle when we saw it.

Over the course of the next few months there were updates from time to time about aluminium prototypes, discussions with Chinese manufacturers, experiments with corrosive substances and laser etching and then eventually toward the end of last year news that things were coming to a head and that Fire was about to be born…

Just after New Year I saw Steve at Peter Hajek’s EPP and he had a few copies available so I took one off him and then promptly left it in its box on a shelf for a couple of months. (I know, I know – sacrilege – I ought to be ashamed, but I did start out by telling you how little time I’ve had for puzzling recently!)

It stayed on the shelf until my mate Ali mentioned at our last MPP that he thought I’d like it… now I trust Ali’s judgement implicitly on important matters like this, so decided that I would need to get over my aversion to solving encrypted clues, take it out of it’s lovely box and do something with it!

I’ve never been a huge fan of solving encrypted clues for mechanical puzzles, but Steve had mentioned that without solving the clues, there is no way you’d be able to solve the mechanical puzzle… so with his warning and Ali’s recommendation, there was only one thing to do: break open the little booklet that comes with Fire and set about decoding the clues…

The clues are encrypted using a strange font of alchemy symbols that Steve had used in our Nuclear Bunker puzzle hunt last year – and by the end of that day, most of us were reading that font like they were standard characters… it didn’t take long for it all to come flooding back. The first clue was pretty straight-forward – apart from using a weird font, it wasn’t really encrypted… great – translating fonts isn’t too tough so I feel slightly less intimidated at dealing with the clues…

That doesn’t last very long as writing out the next clue in a more standard font results in absolute gibberish… as do all the rest of them… so some further work is required – and over the course of a couple of evenings I spend a few hours decrypting them and writing up a set of notes… some of which are rather intriguing – and if my theories on what some of them mean are anywhere near right, this is going to be a really interesting puzzle…

They are. And it is.

A couple of the clues suggest you do something to the puzzle that is a little unusual and it all fits in rather well with Steve’s warning that without solving the clues, you will never be able to solve the puzzle… I do raise an eyebrow  and wonder if my interpretation is right, but there are enough confirmers in there to prompt me to have a bash at it… so on a Friday night I start playing with it and once I get things going, it’s starts doing all sorts of weird things – things that work one minute don’t work the next, and I know I’m starting to get somewhere…

Next morning I pick up things again and manage to make some pretty major progress – and I’m delighted – but I’m not prepared for what happens next – a lovely little piece of theatre presents an entirely new set of challenges – I’m back to solving encrypted clues again but this time things are a little more efficient so I blast through them and set about trying to implement them…

This time I’m rewarded with an open puzzle and some treasure inside in the form of a neat little plastic token with a QR code on it…

Ali was spot on – it’s a terrific puzzle and I’m rather glad that he nudged me into picking it up and getting over my prejudices.

Steve’s website includes a few meta-puzzles and additional challenges and a forum to discuss your experiences with other puzzlers who are struggling with the same things you are and some closed areas for those who’ve solved their puzzles and want to chat about the solutions.

If you’re thoroughly averse to solving encrypted clues, then Steve will sell you a key to decrypting them, but not until after he’s tried hard to convince you not to buy them and to solve them yourself.

It’s great to see a new series of puzzles like this starting out with a bang – if the rest of the elemental series are anything like as good as this one, I’ll be supporting Steve all the way through the journey. The quality of the puzzle is brilliant – everything behaves as it should (although you might not believe that at first!) and the presentation / packaging has been well thought out and beautifully executed.

Nice one Steve!