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Back at the house, he
good-naturedly ran through the tale again for Gill before we feasted on
home-made pizzas and disappeared into the puzzle cave for some
puzzling…in spite of being through the wars recently
and travelling most of the afternoon, he still solved more puzzles than
I did and stayed up later than me… I am not worthy… :-)
Next morning after some croissants we headed down to the hall where we managed to get everything set up before the gang arrived.
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Dave had brought an
enormous box of disentanglement puzzles along for folks to try and
during the course of the day I saw several people stepping up to the
challenge – most slunk away defeated by the looks of
things. (Before you ask, I didn’t even try – I know my limits!)
I enjoyed foisting my
new restricted packing puzzles on all comers – Katsumoto-san’s Packing
Puzzle 4P went down particularly well with everyone going through the
same set of emotions as they tried to solve it:
“that was quite easy” after solving the first side, followed by a
long-ish pause and some muttering before eventually a “Niiiiiiiice!” as
they solved the second side.
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Big-Steve had ordered a
bunch of Japanese goodies for Ali and I and was playing Santa Claus to
two expectant puzzlers. We each ended up with a new Endo-san puzzle,
some tray puzzles from Osho and a new rather
tricky Yamamoto packing puzzle. (He even had a spare copy of the Endo
puzzle that I was able to purchase as an early birthday gift for the
patient.) Thanks Steve!
Someone had brought
along a set of the Yuu Asaka puzzles so I finally got to have a bash at
Wave 7 – I spent a while convincing myself that some strategies wouldn’t
work and then started getting quite creative
– coming pretty darn close to getting everything in at one point, and
just about giving up – at which point the patient says “let me just try
something” and promptly solves it by moving a single piece… I let out a
little primal scream (and swore a bit!) –
he is an expert solver… no question about it. [Excellent puzzle, by the
way – well worth adding to the collection – hopefully I will be
shortly!]
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Frank had brought along
a few well-gummed-up metal puzzles purchased off the inter-web – all
apparently made by a tool-maker for his own amusement. There was a
six-piece burr, a kumiki cube and an impossible
dovetail joint – all pretty much jammed shut and not really wanting to
budge. Chris took them on as a personal mission for the day and duly
disappeared into the kitchen with them, some boiling water, a pile of
serviettes, some washing up liquid and a small
brass brush he produced from his rucksack o’ wonders.
Over the course of the
next hour or two I witnessed Frank and Chris both remarking on the
amazing heat retention capabilities of the steel lumps they were
attempting to dismantle and clean up – time and again they’d
pick something up and then immediately put it down again and remark on
how much hotter they were than they’d expected….after bathing them in
boiling water…
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Several people had a go
at the new Endo-san puzzle and I suspect that more than a couple
managed to complete it – although “someone” helpfully disassembled mine
so that I’d have the full joy of having to find
the right assembly. Thanks!
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I'd taken along the goodies I'd recently acquired from Lee Krasnow - including a set of nested Pennyhedrons which we handed to Ed... who hadn't ever seen a Pennyhedron before. It didn't take him long to unravel the set and line them up in front of him before he proceeded to reassemble them all - although one wag did try removing one from the queue in the hopes of reintroducing it after he'd popped the last one together - he noticed, and it was duly replaced. Ed reckoned it was rather therapeutic unwrapping them all and then reassembling that set.
I'd also taken along a set of Cluster Buster variants that Lee'd printed... at one point I'd jokingly said it might be funny if they were reassembled incorrectly - only to discover some time later that that was what my friends had already helpfully done for me... notice things don't look quite right in there?
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Rich kindly dismantled
my copy of Juno’s T-Slot burr, something that hadn’t been done yet… a
couple of the lads tried reassembly, but it turns out that’s rather a
lot harder so it ended up staying in bits.
Given that Ed had fared rather well on the enormous board burr earlier in the day, we decided he hsould have a bash at the man-sized disentanglement in the puzzle cave - Blind puzzler 1 - Massive disentanglement 0.
Given that Ed had fared rather well on the enormous board burr earlier in the day, we decided he hsould have a bash at the man-sized disentanglement in the puzzle cave - Blind puzzler 1 - Massive disentanglement 0.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr75ljmBmp5fC9xM8Gv9LFRroP-quT_jWAM2ka3OqJJukkcqRnBMVqWGxBL-Ef1Kfs6_cRx7M4W0Hz_y6mmQ2_lVaC-rIw7JyoWpOh7Qd5jz9n1G778_AAvwE3YaYkX2iJpezOfctkVbA/s200/IMG_0830_edited-1.jpg)
…and as it turned out I
had one for him, and several others! I got a copy of Simon
Nightingale’s Slide-oku from Tom Lensch a while back and it’s been on my
pile of things to solve for a long time, so I challenged
the lads in the puzzle cave to solve it for me… and soon enough we had
Chris and Rich doing a lot of the heavy-lifting, Frank and
Louis the patient chipping in and me watching in amazement. It
took a good while, but they managed to deduce a fair amount, then called
on the help of an inter-web Sudoku solver, realised that wouldn’t quite
work and then fell back on the little grey
cells – remembering what sort of a puzzle this is! Late on Saturday
night there was a little cheer as they convinced themselves it had been
solved… quite impressive stuff… I have taken a pic of the solved state
and am sorely tempted to glue everything in
place now – it’s not a casual puzzle! (Thanks guys!)
Sometime around 11pm the stragglers decided they should probably head back to London / up north – and I crashed.
There was some more
puzzling with the patient the next day before I dropped him at the
airport where KLM whisked him back home again.
That’s number 36 then….
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