
More and more puzzlers arrived
until there was literally no room left round Rob’s dining room table – and he
has a pretty big dining room table! The lounge was duly populated with puzzlers
metagrobologising and there was a good buzz about the place.

Ali and Steve had brought along
a slightly oversized set of Nova Plexus sticks – actually they were three times
the size of a standard puzzle hamster-sized Nova Plexus. Ali then spent a few
minutes lashing various bits together and carefully positioning the large rods
in three-space – while Rob tried to keep up with a dinkier set of sticks next
to him.
When the last of the big sticks were edged into place, Ali pulled out a
large hammer and began “encouraging” things into their right place – this is
after all, a rather critical part of the assembly process as any Nova Plexus
assembler will tell you: it’s crucial to get everything properly aligned before
you remove the rubber bands… hearing the tinkle of twelve little metal sticks
is one thing – hearing the din of 12 massive rods bouncing off Rob’s dining
room table wasn’t something any of us wanted to experience. He duly tapped his
way around the structure until he was satisfied that things looked about right
and then proceeded to remove the lacky bands… successfully! Cue several mightily
impressed puzzlers at the sight of a giant Nova Plexus on the table. Rob’s set of
sticks remained less rigidly assembled until Taus took over and quickly
assembled the little pair with almost no fuss whatsoever.


Several wotsits were duly pondered
over – some in real life courtesy of Rob’s crate of what-the-heck! And some
virtually - courtesy of Timo’s phone.
At one point several puzzlers were huddled around a set of brass Hyperboloid Burr pieces in an attampt to prove Steve's theory that if six puzzlers all ran at one another with a piece of the burr fast enough, the burr would assemble itself... they may have been hampered by not having six puzzlers actively participating, but their attempts at a slow-co-ordinate-motion assembly weren't spectacularly successful. They were, however, very funny to observe.
At one point several puzzlers were huddled around a set of brass Hyperboloid Burr pieces in an attampt to prove Steve's theory that if six puzzlers all ran at one another with a piece of the burr fast enough, the burr would assemble itself... they may have been hampered by not having six puzzlers actively participating, but their attempts at a slow-co-ordinate-motion assembly weren't spectacularly successful. They were, however, very funny to observe.

Pretty much everyone managed to
solve my one-piece-two-dimensional-tray-packing-puzzle, albeit everyone was
amused by the fact that something that sounds like it should be thoroughly
trivial, isn’t quite.
I’d also taken along a few
puzzles of my own that I needed to solve and was delighted when I finally
managed to crack Bracket Holes, Iwahiro’s exchange puzzle designed by Hajime
Katsumoto. The object is quite simple: place a few L’s and a Z into a clear
acrylic frame with a few odd shaped holes on both sides… the solution is
anything but simple, requiring puzzlists to think WAY outside the box in new
and exciting ways – I had several mini A-Ha moments before I finally had enough
techniques to string together a complete solution – it’s an absolute delight to
solve!

Somewhere about 9pm we decided
we’d probably sufficiently overstayed our welcome and we piled into a
combination of public transport and private automobiles and headed toward our
hotels. Most of us were staying at the newly reminted Hotel Den Haag so we
ended up in the hotel bar where the new management made it incredibly difficult
to order libations of any sort… I tried asking for a Coke Zero to be told that
the bar was closed and they couldn’t serve me any cocktails – when I looked
even more confused than normal, they offered me beer or soft drinks, so I opted
for a Coke Zero – someone travelling with us, who needn’t remain nameless, felt
that comparisons to Fawlty Towers weren’t amiss. It was hard to disagree based
on how they ran the bar after 10pm. The rooms were spotless and comfortable and
the breakfast the following morning was as good as it used to be… so we’ll
probably be back – we just won’t rely on the bar being able to serve us
anything after 10pm – sort of a BYOB bar.
Back to the bar… the German
twisty puzzle gang had a number of somewhat exotic looking twisties spread
around the table and Steve and I couldn’t quite resist the urge to fiddle with
one of the shape-shifting monsters on display – it quickly lost all semblance
of conformity and no amount of earnest attempts at returning it more or less to
its original form would help… apparently Ali came pretty close to solving it
after I crashed for the evening, but it remained stubbornly unsolved for the
rest of the weekend. (We did consider buying a solved replacement from Hendrik
and attempt a sneaky substitution…)

Several Ubers
collected a series of puzzle sellers and ferried them off to the school hall
and a little while later we followed along courtesy of a lift from Patrick. (Thanks!)
We joined the queue to pay our entry fees and get a name tag – I opted for the
same old name again this year – and then headed into the hall, almost
immediately seeing people we haven’t seen for ages, and the re-acquainting and
catching up began.

Wil had his usual huge collection
of plastic crates full of wonder – nicely balanced between his current latest
finds from around the puzzling world and past treasures from some time ago – I was
delighted to find a copy of Claustrophobia, Nick’s IPP20 exchange puzzle along
with a fairly recent tray-packing puzzle from Mine that I hadn’t seen before.

Diniar had brought along a huge selection
of recently printed goodies and I found myself getting totally confused by his
7-piece moon and star sliding tile puzzle [Question: HOW HARD CAN IT BE? –
Answer: pretty tricky!] – so I felt obliged to take a copy home, along with a
copy of his new sliding tile box with a tree.
(Since getting them home I’ve managed to solve the star and moon, but
the box is still locked solidly!)


Just after the traditional NKC
all-you-can-eat lunch we head upstairs to a darkened room crammed full of metagrobologists
for the afternoon lectures. Before the lectures get underway, Frans is
presented with a Thank You gift for serving as an editor for CFF for more than
20 years before recently retiring. Rox then shows us what you get when you join
two seriously large puzzle collections together, and how you go about
displaying them so that you can actually play with all of them at any time, and
then George gives us a lecture on the various incarnations of puzzle printing he’s
experienced, including a preview of his next virtually commercial-scale
printer. Rob rounds out the afternoon’s lectures with his customary canter
through this year’s IPP exchange puzzles.
I picked up a couple of Rombol
productions that I’d been meaning to get hold of from Hendrik, so the hoard now
has a copy of Bastille and Tower of London – the latter had confused me at Rob’s
place the day before and I’d been meaning to have a bash at Bastille for a while…
now I can say that I’ve had a bash at both of them, and they have both defeated
me – there’s probably a lesson in there somewhere for me, but I’m too darned
dim to learn it.


Another excellent DCD courtesy
of Joop and the NKC gang - this year with a little more hamster-fondling than usual.
Trains, planes and automobiles
take me homeward where the weekend’s loot is unceremonially dumped on the sofabed in the puzzle cave and I crash – it’s been a long weekend.
I had a nice chat with Vladimir and Olga. But I think I should lose a few stone. See you next year!
ReplyDeleteWell played that man! :-)
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