Sunday 24 December 2017

Christmas Challenge 2017



It wouldn’t be Christmas eve in the Walker household if I wasn’t hunched over a PC slicing up photos and mashing them together to make a collage of puzzle pictures to challenge my mates around the world to identify…

So here you are – my Christmas Challenge 2017… one big mash-up of 52(!) puzzles that I reckon are readily identifiable from the bits I’ve shown you. Honest guv! [Click on the pic to get the full size version.]


Usual rules apply: send me an email (please don't put your answers in the comments - that sort of spoils it for everyone!) to: my first name dot my surname at gmail dot com.

Send me a list of puzzle names and with their designers (bonus points if you tell me who made the puzzle in question - in case we need a tie-breaker!).

Entries close at the end of 2017... my time. 

The winner is the puzzlist who gets most right and they will receive one of my spare puzzles (either Popp, Sextbord, Missing Notch or one of my 2017 exchange puzzles) in the post. 

 ...which only leaves me to say: please have a brilliantly festive Christmas and a tremendously puzzling 2018!
allard



Thursday 21 December 2017

OMPIC



James Dalgety is the sort of gentleman that you instinctively want to trust, so when he gives you an exchange puzzle and describes it as rather trivial and says you really ought to be able to put the pieces making up a cube into the frame in under a minute – “One Minute Puzzle In Cube” anyone – you want to take him at his word…


That was my first mistake…


…my second mistake was actually trying to do it in under a minute…


…heck I’d settle for under ten minutes! And be proud of that!


…so I failed – awfully…


… because the frame is squished and the entry holes are off centre – not because I’m a rubbish solver, dear reader, but for all of the reasons above… or that’s my story!


Had I not tried to beat the clock, I might have approached it sensibly, studied the pieces and come up with a sensible strategy, observed the holes more carefully and decided which were likely to be most limiting and require particular pieces, and then only, begin to place the pieces in their final spots, adjusting for any estimation errors along the way – then I might have stood a chance of doing it quickly…

…and if you did solve this one quickly, then I doff my cap to you, gentle puzzler…


…but in the mean time I’m going to carry on muttering to myself under my breath about that man Dalgety! He caught me hook, line and sinkers…

Sunday 17 December 2017

Free Me 5



My first encounter with Free Me 5 was in the Design Competition room in Paris earlier this year… there was a loud twang from the table next to where I was playing, an “Uh-oh” from said table shortly followed by the sight of a puzzler scrabbling around on the floor in search of an errant puzzle-bit… a few minutes later came the confirmation that nothing was missing and Brian had put another proverbial notch on his IPP37 stick.


I had a go at it over the next few days and managed to find my way through most of it… but needed a bit of encouraging right at the end… which if you know this puzzle well, might well surprise you a little! :-)


Turns out I wasn’t the only one who liked it – it won an Honourable Mention from the Jury in the Design Competition. Well Done, Joe!


Right, let’s go back to the beginning: Joseph Turner likes making puzzles to torment his family – in fact he’s been making them puzzles for Christmas for a few years now… and every now and then he enters them in the Design Competition – Free Me 5 was in this year’s Design Competition – and I was rather surprised and somewhat delighted when the Coolen-clan gave me a copy of this little beauty for my birthday. 


Free Me 5 is Joe’s 2016 Christmas Puzzle and comes with the usual risk warning you might expect: No external tools allowed. No excessive force is needed. Beware of little rolly-around thingies. No banging, bending or burning required… and I’m starting to wonder what made Joe need to add that last little bit…


Right – you get a couple of slabs of maple joined by a dovetail along the centre – and there’s a nice big window in the top piece that shows you a trapped coin waiting to be freed… a careful gander around the edges shows a couple more interesting looking holes of differing sizes… but nothing to poke in there.


Fiddle around a bit and you’ll be rewarded with some movement, and possibly even a tool or too… and after you do the (not quite entirely) obvious, you’ll find some thing rather interesting… and signs that this is going to be a nice challenge!


Along the way you’re going to find those little rolly-around thingies – try not to do what Brian did…


There is a thoroughly fantastic bit in the middle here that I’m not going to tell you about, but trust me, it’s brilliant, and then there’s a wonderful little bit of one-part deduction, one-part pure magic… and you’ll have the bits slide almost all the way apart… and that was where I thought I’d finished in the Design Comp room and began reassembling, until Louis pointed out to me that the coin wouldn’t actually come out yet… and he was right – there’s another little step or two to finish things off totally – freeing the coin properly, and in fact taking everything properly apart so you can admire Joe’s handiwork… and it’s good!


If you’re a puzzler, Joe’s Christmas Puzzles are definitely worth trying to get a  hold of!