IPP41 – the main bit

On Friday morning the alarm goes off early so that Gill can round folks up for the fabric and fibre tour… they all rock up in good time and apart from two ladies who try to escape to the Zoo tour, they make it away fine… so a few of us wander down to the Corner Bakery Cafe and have a damn fine breakfast before wending our way back to loiter in the lobby for a while - the Design Comp judging is underway so we can’t get into the Design Comp Room – although a few folks innocently wandered in only to be told to exit immediately by a stern chief judge. There’s puzzling and chatting and Regan shows me the database he’s created in Access and offers me a copy - which I reckon will be a major step up from my current excel spreadsheet…we agree to swap files. 

About a dozen of us headed back to MKT Bar for lunch and had a super meal before dashing back to the hotel for Robert Yarger’s puzzle box-making workshop… Steve, Brian, Ali and I are all on the same table and we have a lot of fun (and laughs) assembling Rob’s superb kits - his instructions are excellent and all of the bits just fit perfectly. Most of us had opted not to glue the boxes together fully so that we could take them home in bits or experiment with the alternative assembly (the kit builds into either of two alternatives)…we get to run through the solutions and see that everything works before heading out (of course it does!). 

We freshen up a bit and head back down for the buses to the J Bar M BBQ for the Founder’s reception where Gill and I share most of a single serving and we’re absolutely stuffed… the band plays plenty of rock and then Jerry introduces all of the Greenhorns and invites them to tell us where they’re from… it’s really cool to see a couple of my MPP muckers up there beaming!

Gill and I head back on the first bus as my chest isn’t enjoying the heat and then I head up to the Design Comp Room where I fail singularly to solve virtually every puzzle I turn my hand to… I crash at a fairly reasonable hour.

Next morning is the puzzle exchange so when I’m ready to head out and find some brekkie I ask if anyone wants to go to Phoenicia for another breakfast, only for Ali to tell me it’s closed and they’re downstairs in Starbucks already… I fail to get a croissant and resort to a toasted cheese sandwich before grabbing my exchange puzzles and heading down to meet Louis in the ballroom. We set out the exchanges and wander around a bit… it’s going to be a great day.

Louis’ organisation is excellent and we get around the whole lot with a couple of hours to spare, which gives me time to get up to the room to take the obligatory shot of exchange puzzles on the bed just as Gill arrives back from lunch with Deirdre, somewhat sodden due to the arrival of a bit of a storm… we then watched it out the window and it was pretty spectacular stuff - plenty of thunder and lighting and squally winds with the rain literally going up outside our window… a foretaste of what Beryl might be bringing.
The afternoon lectures included an insight into Perry’s assembly process, with some excellent self-deprecating humour liberally tossed in, before Robert gave us a virtual tour of Perry’s gift puzzles (jaw-dropping) - all of which were on display in the Design Competition Room… Rox gave us another update on the WPC and George talked about 3D printing with a live demo during the talks - yes, it was that quiet! (Big Louis ended up taking that printer home afterwards…)

While we were hanging around Tye messaged that he had some puzzles in his room for me so Steve and I headed up and we got a little shopping done ahead of the main event on Sunday…

Everyone congregates outside the ballroom for dinner and we establish an MPP-ish table for some more fun. Food service is tres rapido and before we know it, we’re into the announcements of the next couple of IPP venues and dates - cue lots of happy puzzlers who can make travel plans to meet up again next year…

The evening’s entertainment is a magician called Ben Jackson - great patter and he worked the crowd well, making sure we were all on his side and doing some actual twisty solves, along with a couple of effects thrown in. His card-slinging is pretty impressive and along the way he seriously bends some folks heads with some of his mentalism bits… before ending up with a wonderful reveal of a borrowed, signed $100 bill inside a lemon and a prediction of the exact ending time for the show… After dinner winds up I head to the DC room for a little more puzzling and then crash around midnight…

Next morning is the puzzle party so I’m up early grabbing something from Starbucks and chatting to Lee about how I can service my Clutch Box before we join the rather orderly queue to get into the puzzle party proper. There’s a somewhat unruly scrum at Perry’s table so I choose to wander around the room until the mad rush subsides, which turns out to be a bad choice as I end up behind Brian at the table a few minutes later and he buys the last copy that Perry has… which means I have a bit more cash to spend at Tom’s table a little later… first world puzzling problems, eh?!

Boaz is selling all of his latest locks, including a new one from the design comp - also coincidentally his exchange puzzle, so I just end up picking up a commemorative booklet with pics of his dad’s puzzle designs.

I spend a little while chatting with Jerry about his new puzzles and put my name down for a couple of his big hitters…

By the time I get to Tom’s table there are still plenty of wonders on display and I end up choosing a few to add to the hoard… I suspect that some of them are going to take me quite a while to solve…

Takeshi had copies of the not-quite-released Hanayama puzzle available and I manage to snag a lovely copy of Onigiri from Teddy… Brian (M) had some thoroughly delicious looking wooden bits and I grabbed a copy of Ring the Changes that I’d enjoyed playing with in the DC…

At one point I ended up buying a bunch of gift puzzles from Tye to take back to the UK where I’m sure they’ll find good homes…

There are announcements during the course of the morning about the incoming weather - the tail of Hurricane Beryl is due to hit on Monday morning so folks head out to the shops to grab some food to stash in their rooms just in case we end up with limited options for food – I strongly suspect we ain’t going to starve even if we are cut-off from civilisation for a week or more…

When the puzzle party winds up, we head into the lectures where Aaron talks to us about the evolution of PuzzleCAD, Brian and Sue tell us about their wonderfully puzzling life and Chinny gives us a peek into his turning endeavours. 

The foul weather begins to roll in and we can see the wind and the rain (and thunder and lightning) coming across the city – it’s quite an impressive spectacle… by now we’re getting increasingly dire warnings about the incoming weather and we hear formally that NASA have cancelled our trip the next day… the committee is running around organising things when we’re heading into dinner and we agree to move some of the entertainment that we’ve got teed up into the next day so that we can finish the dinner early and the hotel staff can get home before the worst of the weather arrives.

We rattle through dinner and then Nick does the usual presentation with all of the designer’s names before handing out the awards to the winning designers… we have a huge cheer from our table when the Monkeys win an award for BMSD… and Juno wins the top gong on the night for Hugo… both well-deserved.

There are a long series for thank-yous for all the folks involved in the organising before Perry does a presentation on the host gifts for Matt and Steven, before handing them over.

With all of the formalities out of the way, and IPP coming formally to a close, there is a lot of standing around and chatting - and just a little more puzzling - specifically a couple of folks totally dismantle the Monkeys trophy puzzles and then create a single interlocking house-like structure…much to the amusement of everyone… Rich then decides he can do even better and builds a NOS burr inside the frame - not satisfied with that, he subsequently assembled two BMSDs inside one of the frames… apparently it took Steve until the early hours of the morning to retrieve them…and a few days after returning home he’d managed to reassemble his trophy.

Everyone shifts outside the ballroom onto a series of large tables for some more puzzling and miraculously some bottles of beer arrive, so we’re set… Roger is doing magic and certifying folks for time travel - I think I made it, but it was a close call with the red and blue lights not always getting triggered at the right time.

IPP41 – calm before the storm

It’s 4am and we’re wide awake… the flight across the pond was brilliant thanks mainly to BA deciding to upgrade us (which solved the “why have our seat numbers changed from last night when we checked-in” puzzle), the trip through IAH was pretty efficient (there was literally no queue at immigration!) and the drive to the hotel was fair-speedy. We managed to find a few puzzling people in the lobby after we’d unpacked our stuff in the room (mental note, ship your damn exchange puzzles next time!) - we haven’t seen Nigel in years so we get to catch up a bit and he entertains us with the story of his bus trip from the airport… he’s sharing a room with Ali who’s due in a bit later, so Nigel’s lurking in the lobby - not that unusual for an IPP, to be fair!

We settle into chatting to Brian & Sue and Jim & Susan and end up heading over the road to The Grove for some dinner (nice grub, but not cheap) - we have a great time catching up - we haven’t seen the Strayers in 6 years so there’s lots to catch up on… as we’re finishing off with dinner Steve arrives with the New Zealand contingent and we stand around chatting for a bit before we all head back to the hotel where we take up residence in the bar so that Steve and his mum can finally get some dinner. Deirdre is royally entertaining and it’s immediately clear that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. While we’re in the bar, Ali finally manages to clear immigration and makes it to the hotel - there’s much hugging and greeting - I haven’t seen Ali for a couple of weeks at least - and Nigel can finally get into his room!

I crash at about 10… and then find myself wide awake having a debrief with Gill at 4am - jet lag has made sure we’re both wide-awake - but it’s still a great start to IPP41!

Gill and I head out to find some breakfast and end up in a nice little restaurant for a jolly decent breakfast before we head back to the hotel to help Brian, Marc and co. set up the Design Comp room…they’ve virtually finished by the time we get there so Gill and I end up catching up with Kellian and occasionally disassembling a puzzle or two for the comp… from there I spend a bit of time on the quiz for Sunday and get some things printed off at the business centre (wow, they’re organised!). We grab a bite to eat at the deli and find Dave & Jan, Rob and Boaz in the lobby - cue more hugs and greetings… there’s going to be a lot of that - we haven’t seen a bunch of these folks in several years and it’s good to be back among my tribe!

Gill and I take a wander to the Phoenicia Market to grab some lunch (Spanakopita) and snacks for the room (soft drinks and emergency breakfast supplies)… Nigel and the Monkeys have headed off to lunch at Hearsay and we don’t see them for several hours but they come back raving about the joint, which is a good sign and enough reason to add it to the list for potential meals over the next few days…

Hanging out in the lobby becomes progressively better as more and more puzzlers arrive - there’s a contingent of Dutch puzzlers so we catch up with Wil, Frans and Louis… Clive arrives and regales us with tales of his recent trip (up) - if you really want a good laugh, ask him what he thinks of the French hospital that treated him! He’s still clearly in a lot of pain - to the point that Big Steve actually helps him up after he collapsed in a chair instead of just laughing at him, as we normally would, ‘cos we’re nice like that!

Somewhere around 5:30 Steven starts rounding up folks and pointing them in the direction of the Brewery for the unofficial outing… a bunch of us decide we’ll walk to the nearby food court to grab something simple for dinner… only to find they’ve closed early … so we head across the road to the MKT Bar where they fed and watered us wonderfully, even if we did overstay our welcome quite a bit… (but now we know they close at 7:30!).

Back in the lobby there are a lot of puzzlers now… it’s great to catch up with Kelly and John P… Rod and Nick spend quite a while trying to work out Regan’s safe puzzle… including the use of several well-external tools… Regan definitely got a kick out of the fact that they were somewhat stumped for quite a while…

Bob brought out his massive stellation construction kit and Marc and John spent ages working their way through the various impressive structures… loved Bob’s description of gluing over 3,000 magnets in place for the project as “quite zen”! [That kit came out again later in the week and this time the giant structure ended up getting dumped on a table with the ensuing collapse into thousands of pieces being captured for posterity.]

Thursday morning we head out to a likely breakfast spot only to find it was in fact closed… apparently July 4^th is some sort of holiday over here, so we go back to Phoenicia (which was open!) where we got ourselves a jolly decent brekkie enjoyed just outside the deli.

Back to the hotel for registration and portrait shots, aka pulling funny faces for Perry.

I spend a few hours in the Design Comp room with not much solving on my part, but plenty of banter and nice chat about IPP, playing with puzzles and blaming Jerry for all of this…

Lunch is a choc chip cookie and an iced mocha (having had a huge breakfast at Phoenicia) courtesy of Starbucks in the lobby before heading into the first puzzle box-making workshop with Kel Snache… we had plenty of laughs with Brian and Steve at opposite ends of our table along with several impressionable greenhorns… I think they had fun and mostly the puzzle boxes functioned, except for Steve’s - which was more of a one-way puzzle box. Rich arrives looking somewhat frazzled – I don’t think he’s slept much in the past 24 hours… but in spite of that he manages to get registered.

Gill managed to catch the end of the Murrays’ match from Wimbledon up in the room and after a bit of a break we headed down to the buses to POST for the 4th of July fireworks… we grab some street food and eat outside on the loading dock where we hatch a plan to grab some Ubers and head back to the air conditioning of the hotel bar… where Ali and I enjoy our milkshakes and the rest have some more traditional fare from the bar. We chat for a while and then most of us crash early… with fireworks from the park across the road punctuating our sleep… there’s no midnight debrief this time so we may have kicked the jet lag, but my throat is scratching something horrible and I’m hoping I don’t lose my voice ahead of the exchange…

Air Lock

One of my favourites from an earlier Pelikan release, Air Lock is a classic Goh Pit Khiam design: a simple frame and five straight-forward pieces begging to be placed inside said frame – the only possible hurdle is the rather narrow (two voxel) opening in the frame – that and the clear acrylic that’s stopping you from simply dropping the pieces into the frame.

A simple visual inspection of the pieces is going to show you that not only are rotations required just to get at least one of those pieces into the frame at all, once you get some of the pieces inside the frame, there is very little room to actually do anything useful… there are ample holes in the clear acrylic to allow access to manoeuvre those pieces, there just isn’t an awful lot of spare room!

…so a plan is going to be required.

*

Of course I set out “knowing” where some of the more troublesome pieces would have to go and I duly spent a while trying to make that work… as you might expect, that turned out to be pretty fruitless and I went back to basics and jettisoned all of my “knowledge”.

…that allowed a couple of rather more helpful discoveries, and in due course the discovery of a wonderful solution path that that is an absolute delight. Everything needs to be done in just the right order, or nothing works… I did say it was a classic Goh Pit Khiam design after all. 

 

* No that isn’t the solution – there’s a stray voxel in the opening – that’s not allowed.

Cash Back

I managed to snag a copy of Cash Back from Alan’s second release and it arrived at the tail end of the week. Gill had a pile of pals around so I spent some quality time fiddling around with the latest little cubic wonder.

It’s the same size and colour as it’s brethren, there’s the familiar coin/token waiting patiently to be freed and the usual assortment of holes and slits around the sides… oh, and the rather obvious bolt. Of course there’s also the familiar instruction card telling you not to break the puzzle, as if…

I duly get sucked into this one and find myself doing the obvious things and I find I can make stuff happen, and even make it unhappen (sometimes that’s important!). Stuff moves around and I feel like it’s useful, but it’s not getting me very close to freeing the coin…

… I spend quite a while trying very similar things and getting exactly the same reaction and keep hoping that something different might just happen… Yup, I should know better!

After a particularly fruitless period I try something different and find the in my lap – which is great, except I seem to have found myself up a creek with my paddle stuck in a tree. You had one useful tool and you managed to get it jammed! Call yourself a puzzlist?

I spend a little while panicking and trying increasingly desperate things but I can’t find my way out of there… and I begin to doubt the designer’s abilities – have I been able to do something I thought was sensible and bricked my puzzle?

Turns out the answer to that is “No, Alan Lunsford is a damn good puzzle designer!” – I’m just not quite up to his level of thinking yet… it does take me a little while longer but I finally manage to get there and my faith in the designer and his mighty excellent puzzles is thoroughly restored…

I really loved the cat and mouse game that I nearly lost in there… highly recommended if you know someone who needs taking back down a peg or two.

Hugo the Hippo

TLDR: Juno has yet another award-winning puzzle right there!

When Juno announced the imminent arrival of Hugo the Hippo, he was at pains to point out that this wasn’t a sequential discovery puzzle – it was a secret opening box – and one that he thought wouldn’t be particularly challenging for puzzlers. It was almost as though he was trying to manage expectations down and dampen down any enthusiasm…

As it turned out, his entire first batch sold out in under a couple of minutes so I was lucky to be around for the sale and managed to snag a copy that duly arrived about a week later.

Hugo is a handsome hunk of Fijian Mahogany (with a few little bits of Jarrah for colour and some other bits and bobs for the mechanics). He has eyes that follow you around the room and a cheeky personality with a big grin inviting you to have a go at discovering his secrets.

I’m not going to describe much of the solve because I think that’s such a fun little journey that everyone needs to enjoy themselves… I will confirm that he has a massive toothy maw and that the cheeky little fella will give the unwary a little nip from time to time. (I loved that bit…)

The puzzley bits are most definitely sequential, with several fun discoveries along the way. The mechanisms are wonderfully robust, as you’d expect from Juno, so you won’t have any qualms about letting anyone have a go at Hugo.

For me, this is a classic Juno puzzle that really hits the sweet spot for maximising puzzling fun. You don’t need to be a black belt puzzlist to stand a chance of solving Hugo, and I reckon that literally everyone will get a decent dopamine hit from playing with Hugo.

It’s the sort of puzzle that would probably do very well in a sort of head-to-head competition where puzzlists choose their favourite new puzzle… if there were such a thing, of course.

MPP LCII

This was definitely the most exclusive MPP in a long while… we had none of the usual overseas visitors and Big-Steve was over in Hobbit-land visiting his mum. As a result MPP literally only started at 10am on Saturday for me instead of the evening before. I picked up some milk and cold drinks on my way to the hall and I’d just about got most of my stuff out of the car when Ali and the London gang pulled in.

I set up the stuff in the kitchen while the lads unpacked some tables and chairs… clearly channelling Steve in the process… they settle on one straight row and a zig-zag row to encourage conversation, with one table up against the wall for anyone we didn’t like… in the end that one didn’t get used – draw your own conclusions!

I’d printed a bunch of things to dish out and spent a while encouraging folks to have a play with a three-piece cube assembly I’d found on Printables by something called mad gardener – I’d printed off a pile of the 4*4*4 cubes because I thought they were fun, and a couple of the 5*5*5 cubes because I thought they were less fun… clearly I’m not a good judge of puzzles as everyone who played with the 5*5*5 succeeded in assembling them rather rapidly and pronounce them good… I managed to find homes for all of the 5*5*5’s and a chunk of the 4*4*4’s, but there’s still a pile of those left, so I may need to take them to America to foist them on some unsuspecting puzzlers who don’t know better.

I’d also printed off a few sets of George Bell’s Hex Screws – I’d tried, spectacularly unsuccessfully to put the simple assembly together so I offer rich a copy if he’d assemble a set for me – and of course I wanted the difficult assembly – it was Rich after all! He ended up spending a fair amount of time, but managed to crack it in the end and I now have an assembled copy in my cabinet – and if anyone disassembles it, they will probably be drowned in the tears of a disentanglement of puzzlers – you’ve been warned…

Rich brought along a couple of sets of Akaki’s baskets and a few folks who hadn’t yet made their acquaintance ended up scoring a few of them – he’d re-printed a set in a different size so he was giving away the smaller set – good lad!

Rich also brought along a bunch of his own designs – a couple of design studies of three-linked six-piece burrs -one set included Love’s Dozen and Piston Burr tied to a third burr to make for some interesting interactions – I can vouch for the fact that it’s well-challenging trying to keep your head around them…

He also had a few simple little two piece take-aparts that lead you nicely up the garden path and then stop you and make you think when you get onto the third one…

One of the good things about having a smaller bunch this time around was that we got to spend some time getting to know folks a little better – I had no idea that Pastor Dan was in fact a Reverend (available for weddings, divorces and burials – apparently he never leaves home without a shovel just in case he’s called upon) and we heard about the time Kyle thought he’d nearly died in a hot tub (literally days before that Friendly actor did) – he’d finished off (but not in a weird way – © KCM) in the hot tub outdoors in the driving rain (again, not in a weird way – © KCM) when he became very light-headed (you’re getting the hang of this now, aren’t you?) and he swears there was no Ketamine involved, but apart from that, the likeness with Matthew Perry’s death a few days later was apparently uncanny! (But not in a weird way – © KCM.)

Kyle had a set of his wooden puzzles and I took the opportunity to play with them as I hadn’t seen them before… I can definitely see why they’ve been so popular on Discord – I managed to limp my way through the first two, but the third one had me asking for a hint and still not getting any further… so I’m going to have to try again in the future.

Hugo the Hippo had arrived earlier in the week so he had an outing and several folks enjoyed taking him to bits and then reassembling him…

We totally managed to miss out on the pig rolls, arriving on the high street just after they’d sold out so I ended up with pork en croute and an onion bhaji. Healthy eating at its finest!

Dale tormented Frank and a few others with Teddy’s Bear(?) which arrived and left in bits – spending a brief amount of time badly (very badly!) entangled, but never solved.

Back at the house afterwards Frank and Chris had a go at Jesse’s Captain’s Quest – Frank doing most of the solving with Chris proving a running sound effect score to enhance Frank’s solving experience (but not in a weird way – © KCM). When the sound effects weren’t amusing Chris sufficiently, he resorted to words of encouragement (“Pump, it more Frank” – albeit not in a weird way – © KCM). At one point most of us were in tears – but to their credit, they did manage to pretty much complete the solve…

Some of Juno's older designs had a thorough playing with and Lilly showed the boys a thing or two onAir lock and Ziggu-Hook. Alexander Magyarics' Delta Force (courtesy of Tye) had a good playing with with quite a surprising number of folks managing to find the symmetric assembly...

Somewhere in between there was some fish and chips and most folks headed home as it was getting dark, so not too late an evening… and then on Sunday, I find myself with time to write up the obligatory blog post… and while it still feels weird not having any visitors at all for an MPP, it was a damn fun day’s puzzling with my mates – thank you all for the amusement you provided, intentionally or otherwise!

Spinning Tumblers v2

Phil’s first Spinning Tumblers was a nice puzzle – not massively challenging – things largely did what you wanted them to do - you know – it was fun!

Then Eric stepped it up a notch with Psycho Disks, where some things didn’t quite do what you wanted them to… sometimes. It definitely added some confusion.

Now Phil’s taken things to a whole new level. You may think you know what to expect, but trust me you don’t!

Sure, the family resemblance is still there – the form factor is pretty much identical, most of the disks spin, most of the time, and sometimes you’ll even feel like you can controls things… but just when you think you’ve got it sussed, Phil throws you a curveball and you’ll find yourself having a “what the heck?!” moment.

I spent a while going backwards and forwards and struggling to make head or tail of things… I’d come up with a theory and then have it totally blown out of the water a few minutes later… there are elements that behave in ways we’ve seen before, and then there is just plain weirdness that makes almost no sense…

I’d spent absolute ages plugging away at it while learning very little so I took it across on my King’s Day jaunt hoping I’d get some quality puzzling time… and then Ali duly sat down and solved it in front of me in a matter of minutes – I was somewhat gobsmacked, but when I had a look at what was happening inside there, my admiration for both Ali’s solving prowess and Phil’s puzzle-design-chops grew ten-fold.

The family lineage may be clear, but the guts of this little beastie are next generation… after I’d snapped a pic of my serial number (04 for the record) Ali carefully put it back together and rather kindly left “things” quite near the solved position, which was nice of him… the friendly customs man at Schiphol on the way home managed to undo that kindness, so when I got home and tried to open it up again, I found myself having to start from pretty much from scratch – serves me right, I guess!

Armed with a little knowledge of what I’d seen inside there, I managed, with a fair amount of struggling(!) to finally get STv2 open once again… there is so much more to the second version - think of the first one as your genial nan, and the second one as the wolf in nan’s nightclothes salivating while waiting for Little Red Riding Hood.

Phil, you beat me – I suspect I’d still be wandering in the woods if Ali hadn’t helped me out a bit (OK, a lot!) on this one! 

An elegantly simple, excellent design, beautifully made as usual!!

 

King’s Day 2024

The alarm goes off at 5:30 last Saturday morning and I’m happy - this is one of my favourite weekends of the year: Wil throws a brilliant get-together at his place in Venlo on this Sunday each year (pandemic permitting) and I get to spend a weekend with my mates puzzling without having to do any of the organising myself!

I get to the airport a bit early as there’s a lot of building work in the terminal and there have been some horror stories of massive queues for security… but I find myself getting sent through the priority lane (for no good reason) and I manage to bypass even the little queue there was… of course my bag gets pulled for checking because I’ve brought Phils latest little brass wonder to puzzle on over the weekend. It gets a swabbing and another run through the x-ray machine before I’m allowed to hit Starbucks for a very leisurely coffee and croissant accompanied by some Nikoli puzzles to get the brain going – I’m not sure it works.

The flight is uneventful and after a bit of a detour through immigration I grab a train leaving within minutes of getting onto the platform. I send up the bat signal to let Louis know which train I’m on and he finds me in the usual spot… at this stage I should probably comment on the massive crowds all wearing orange for King’s Day – I look severely under-dressed without any orange clothing whatsoever – it’s easy to spot the tourist!

I check in and ditch the baggage and we head to Louis’ place where Steve and Ali are in full-on puzzle mode – resplendent in their orange t-shirts… I feel even more unpatriotic! Louis puts on a massive spread for lunch before we settle into some communal puzzling.

I’d taken along a bunch of copies of Rik Bouwer’s KubusMix, courtesy of George Bell’s STLs (Thanks George!) as well as a couple of 3D printed Wayne Daniels Four Piece Tetrahedrons, once again courtesy of George’s STLs. The boys didn’t take long to assemble them and I reckon everyone gets a kick the first time they realise what those six strange-looking pieces in two colours might just make…

Ali had a go at my copy of Phil’s Spinning Tumblers v2 and made relatively short work of it – so I now know that I have #4. I have a quick squizz at the innards before Ali very carefully puts it back in the bag ready to open… although he needn’t have bothered – by the time I get through Schiphol security they’ve had it out and fiddled with it and when I get home I found it’s all locked up again… serves me right for trying to be cute!

Minima’s Domino and Twig are also a hit at the table, but nobody manages to find a solution for Delta Force that Tye chucked into my last order (“so that the box wouldn’t be empty!”)…

I have a fiddle with a few of Ali’s Craig Lawton 9-Layer Puzzles – they really are nicely made from nine laser-cut layers of wood and acrylic. I manage to solve one of them properly, another opens with a bit of luck but the others remain well and truly locked up… maybe next time…

Louis orders in a pile of pizzas for dinner before we head out to an escape room… in Belgium. With everyone wearing orange all day and most of the locals visiting either a music festival or a street-market somewhere, all of the local escape rooms are closed, so Louis has found one for us half an hour away in Belgium, as you do…

The escape room turns out to be a bank heist and the gang throw themselves into it as though this was their day job. We play dress-up – Louis looked particularly fetching in that red coat, break into a couple of safes, crack several passwords, abuse an ATM and defeat a Mission Impossible style laser-field to grab the gold… we did spend a while trying to get through the laser-field “properly”, i.e. Louis tried to climb over and around the beams but that wasn’t particularly successful, so in the end Steve just barrelled through it and grabbed the gate before it had a chance to lock itself. After our successful escape we had quite a long debrief in the car on the way back to Louis’ with Steve comparing his dash for the gate to the grace of a gazelle, while others preferred comparisons to silverbacks and rhinoceroses.

A few more hours puzzling back at Louis’ before he dropped us back at the hotel somewhere around midnight… I crash and get up in time to join Ali and Steve for breakfast… it’s a long breakfast with plenty of chat, including discussion of the relative merits of gazelles and rhinoceroses. Louis collects us and we head off to Venlo. (No rhinos spotted en route.)

Wil greets us like long-lost friends and he’s soon plying us with coffee and tarts (of the local fruity variety). Folks start arriving from all over the countryside and soon there’s a pretty decent throng of puzzlers filling up the house and the garden – complete with a new roof extension covering half the garden – that pays for itself later in the day when the heavens opened briefly and we were able to shelter outside without overrunning the living room.

I spread around the remaining copies of KubusMix and encourage folks to have a play and help themselves to a copy and I manage to get rid of all them, just so I don’t need to cart them all home again, you understand. Only a few folks manage to get the colouring wrong and incur a little abuse as a result.

At lunchtime there are some really scrumptious pizzas and we get to meet Wil’s daughter… later there’s more of the usual spread of sandwiches and sweet treats and plenty of coffee and coke to go around.

At some point Steve and I gravitate upstairs to trawl through the many crates just in case there’s some treasure in there. Steve gamely unpacks a crate at a time for us to rake through until he realises his mistake and finds himself trapped behind a wall of puzzles and to-be-puzzles – although in fairness to Wil, sometimes it’s not easy to work out the difference between the two – everything is a puzzle for Wil… some of them just aren’t quite finished yet.

I have a great time catching up with old friends, passing on some English chocolates and exchanging some foldy stuff for a couple of old Rockys and a Petit Four I’m missing.

Everyone has to spend a while playing with Oskar’s latest creations (it’s da law!) and I find myself really enjoying his latest Zigu-variant so I purchase a copy of Zigu-Hook as it’s really fun to fiddle with. He has all manner of new bolts and gears and toys and it’s easy to spend an hour or two just fiddling.

Sometime after five, Wil rounds everyone up and we pile into cars off to his favourite Chinese Restaurant that's just in the throes of reopening properly after the pandemic. We must have about 16 people and they manage to deal with the challenge of feeding a bunch of hungry puzzlers who are dead-set on puzzling most of the way through their dinner… the food is as good as it ever was.

More puzzling and chatter back at Wil’s place after dinner before Louis drops us back at the hotel and I mange to crash at about 1am… I’m not built for late nights anymore!

The monkeys join me for breakfast bright and early next morning even though their flight is only late that afternoon. We chat about the fun we’ve had, puzzles we’ve unexpectedly chanced upon and solved and the relative merits of various sorts of wild animals, oddly. (rhino > gazelle)

I grab the train to Schiphol and kill a few hours with my Nikoli booklet again. Aside from a bit of a wait getting onboard the aircraft due to a delay in getting some inbound passengers off it, my travel home is pretty uneventful… even if I have to leave the sunshine behind at Schiphol.

Thanks Wil for hosting us all and Louis for taking care of us the whole weekend – that was a really brilliant weekend.

More Minima!

Just after I wrote about the set of Minima Puzzles I’d acquired, both Tye and Frederic got in touch. Frederic happily engaged in a bit of back and forth on the thinking behind the Minima series, how he approaches the design process and told me about a couple of Minima designs that will hopefully be produced in the future – some of which sound absolutely awesome! Tye was chuffed that I’d enjoyed them so much and had appreciated the effort that went into producing them.

Frederic and Tye both pointed out that there was another already in the Nothing Yet Designs shop (Minima Domino), with a further one due along shortly… so I duly bought a copy of Domino and asked Tye to hang onto it as I was about to head out on holiday… somewhere along the way Minima Twig was released and I added that to the order and when I got back home, Tye shipped them over… along with a pile of other puzzles he just threw in, “so that the box wouldn’t be empty”! (Thanks Tye - I’m still working my way through a few of those!)

Minima Domino consists of the usual form-factor box with a single 2*1 opening on one side. Two of the other sides have a small slit and there are a number of thoughtful holes to facilitate a little manoeuvring of the pieces inside the box… there are a couple of captive blocks already helpfully placed in opposite corners and your task is to simply insert the 5 dominoes into the box…

See when I said those two blocks had been helpfully placed in the opposite corners, I lied… it turns out they really make things a lot more complicated. Once again the elegance of the design shines through on this puzzle – the 5 dominoes are identical so you don’t need to keep track of different pieces – it’s all “just” about getting them inside the box.

I ended up spending some time working through the potential ways of arranging the pieces in the box in a bid to reduce the number of assemblies to try… it’s not hard to deduce what’s possible for the final move or two, but the “interesting” bit is then trying to get the preceding pieces into place without needing to move pieces through one another or indeed through the side wall of the box.(The latter is discouraged.)

As you’d expect, every little element of the design is both necessary and (just) sufficient – the Minima-family-resemblance is clear.

Minima Twig looks totally different – while the box-shape is the same as the rest of the series, the pieces (once again all dominoes) have steel twigs sprouting out from either an end or a side and there are a number of slots and holes in the box that seem to be far more about the twigs than about facilitating rotations… this one’s different!

This time you’ve clearly got two types of pieces and it looks as though you’re going to need to get a twig protruding from every hole or slot in the box… he wouldn’t give you an extra hole or two, would he?

Experimenting to try an find which piece can use which holes is quite fun… don’t be tempted to assume you’ve found all the different ways of using those holes and slots until you’ve actually solved the puzzle – keep an open mind!

Start putting pieces in and you quickly find yourself back in familiar Minima-territory - the order of assembly is critical, even with just two types of pieces. The solution path might not be as complex as some of the earlier Minima, but the A-Ha’s along the way are just as pleasant.  

Definitely a worthy addition to the canon – and clearly the funkiest looking one so far… lovely work by Tye on a super design from Frederic.

I’m definitely keeping an eye out for any new designs in this series.