DCD 2023

I grabbed a train down to London on Friday afternoon and met up with Rich in the bar. Ali and Steve drove into town and then Ali carted us off to Cluequest for a couple of escape rooms before dinner. We manage to save the world from being mutated into sheep(!) in spite of some of us managing to ignore massive big clues along the way and then we disarmed a post box… excellent rooms at Cluequest - we’ve got one more to play there, but there’s news that they may be getting a new room sometime next year, so hopefully there’ll be a couple for us to play by the time DCD comes around again…

After putting the world to rights, we grabbed a pizza at a very trendy place (you could tell by the fact that the rest of the clientele was about half our age – and we had Rich with us remember!) where the pizza turned out much better than we’d been dreading it might be from the descriptions on the menu. After we’d refuelled we headed back to the hotel bar for a libation and some banter. Rich disappeared off upstairs to drop something off in his room and Steve and I spent about 15 minutes trying unsuccessfully to get served at the bar - mainly because it had closed about half an hour earlier - turns out Londoner’s don’t drink in hotels on a Friday evening - who knew?

Steve and I give up on waiting for Rich and head upstairs, only for the lift to decide it’s overloaded - really rude given there’s literally only four of us in the jolly thing!

We meet up in the lobby before the sparrows wake up and Rich amuses us by telling us he’d been locked out of his room the night before - Liz had gone to sleep and turned off her phone with the only key inside the room, and it seems she’s not a light sleeper so it took half an hour of bashing on the door to raise her…

At St Pancras there are a lot of people in Springbok rugby shirts heading off the Rugby World Cup final in Paris… there aren’t many springbok supporters on the train to Rotterdam. We amuse ourselves with some puzzles and briefly with a Professor Puzzle escape room in a box - we get an extra hour’s puzzling time because there’s a problem with a train ahead of us so we grind to a halt for a while… Rich has brought snacks and there’s plenty of coffee and puzzles so we don’t mind at all.

We navigate the Metro (a first for me) to find Louis in Voorburg and he takes us through to the school so we can dump Steve’s stock and considerably lighten his load. We swing via the hotel to collect Stefan and squash him into the back seat between Rich and I and head off to Delft to find Rob’s new house… we miss it on the first lap of Delft city centre but manage to spot it on the second lap… we blame Rob’s directions, which in fairness are excellent as long as you know what’s coming up next, e.g. turn before the building site… but you only know it’s a building site once you’ve driven past it…

A couple of the guys are already drowning their sorrows in caffeine so we join them… the puzzles come out, the helpful banter begins to flow and more puzzlers arrive until we’re more or less filling Rob’s new lounge with laughter and encouragement - and the odd bit of abuse.

We spend several hours playing with puzzles and catching up with folks we haven’t seen for a while - the customary pizzas arrive and there’s a bit of a lull in the noise levels as we feast, and then we’re back into full tilt puzzling again.

Rob brings out  a shopping bag full of what looks like bits of a dinosaur skeleton and in a fabulous bit of misjudgement, he entrusts the assembly to Steve and Rich – who proceed to build a franken-beetle-saurus which Steve then proudly displays on top of Rob’s puzzle cabinet.

I decide to embarrass myself and have another go at solving Ali’s exchange puzzle from Jerusalem -YES - I’ve been trying to solve it for three months now… and finally get the inspiration to do the right thing and it turns out I am an eedjit and Ali has beaten me thoroughly! Given that I’m already getting so much grief for the fact that I’m spending literally three months longer solving these puzzles than the rest of the assembled rabble, I pick up Rob’s copy of Picolock expecting to add another few hours to my unsuccessful solving time… but some helpful comments on some of the things that I’m randomly verbalizing while I’m not solving it lead me to reassess a few assumptions I hadn’t realized I’d made and soon I’m actually making some progress on that one… and about ten minutes later it’s also solved and I’m ready to sing Boaz’s praises for a long time…

I go three for three by picking up Peter’s exchange puzzle and literally solving it in seconds… well, OK, three months and some seconds…

Somewhere around midnight we figure we better head back to Voorburg and check into our hotel - we find the night manager and get our rooms and collapse until the next morning…

Breakfast is excellent and Louis takes a car-full of puzzlers back to the school for the main event.

There are already piles of puzzlers there so Steve sets out his stall while the rest of us set about chatting to friends and shopping furiously, or indeed some combination of the two.

I spend a while chatting to Jan Willem and spot some Rocky Chiaro puzzles on his table and end up purchasing a few of the ornate “things” that Jan Willem has decided to let go - I promise to give them a good home. Wil has his usual long array of crates of treasure - where else are you going to find most of the Roger D puzzles stacked up next to some collectible Karakuri boxes and a Pachinko box for sale? Marcel had a huge selection of stuff from the latest Hanayamas through to several of his own original chess pieces and some Sandfield and Trevor Wood treasures… 

Tony Fisher has brought a few throughly bonkers creations over for our enjoyment - I have never seen a skewb that large or indeed dinosaur eggs like that...(fact!). 

The usual excellent spread at lunchtime filled us all up.

Jack had a huge selection of petite puzzles and I held back from his table until much later in the day, before I hoovered up a bunch of his tray puzzles and a few other little bits and pieces that make excellent puzzling gifts.

Leo was auctioning off some rather collectible items in an actual real-world silent auction which was really amusing to watch. Grown men scribbling on post-it notes and then watching everyone else like a hawk… and the real-life sniping at the end of the auction that was almost entirely undone when Leo began closing out the auction three minutes before the appointed time, much to the consternation of the snipers in the audience. Peace did prevail and Steve bought an expensive jam jar with some sand and a few marbles in it and I bought an expensive pair of scissors with some string attached - and we were both delighted.

The afternoon lectures included some insights into 2*2 Rubik’s cubing at world championship level from someone who does (that was way more fascinating than I thought I’d find it!), an update from George and Rox on the World Puzzle Centre (I suspect they’ve spelt it wrong!) and Rob gave us a canter through a selection of the exchange puzzles from Jerusalem this year… well, the ones he won’t be covering in the upcoming CFF article anyway…

After we’d reset the hall for the school lunch, a bunch of us headed off to a nearby Chinese joint where we duly caused havoc - there were fourteen of us… we had fun, and the buffet survived the onslaught, just…

After dinner Louis ferried Chris to the station and our baggage back to the hotel where Steve and I found him about twenty minutes later… some of the others who were walking back with us took a more scenic route and got to the hotel about half an hour later…

Four of us ended up in the bar playing with puzzles - I know, weird, eh?

Next morning Steve and I ended up having a leisurely breakfast while Rich topped up his beauty sleep (and I’m not going to comment on whether or not he needed it) before Steve headed off on a bit of a wander and I headed off to the room to type up my thoughts before I forgot the more important stories of the weekend.

...fashionable gentlemen meet-up

We checked out at the bell and then navigated the public transport system back to Rotterdam to find some lunch and our Eurostar back to St Pancras… we found a great burger joint just outside the station and then headed across at the appointed time, where we found a slightly tetchy crowd of folks outside the Eurostar check-in area – it seems that the high-speed trains weren’t running through Rotterdam, as such, there was no Eurostar to catch. The advice was to make our way to Brussels where the staff would put us on a train, promise! The next three hours turned into a mini-Race-Around-The-World as we took four trains to get ourselves to Brussels, where the friendly staff did indeed put us on a train from Brussels to London as there was still no service north of Brussels…

We ended up with a table to play with our puzzles and made our way through the Exit the Game Lord of the Rings adventure… to the occasional amusement of a rather serious fellow traveller on our table.

We may have gotten into St Pancras about three hours later than anticipated, but it was still an awesome puzzling weekend!