Haleslock 6 aka Who Dares Wins

Take one part incredibly talented designer of puzzle locks, mix cautiously with two parts brass puzzle wizards, add a little monkey business and you have the perfect recipe for puzzling mayhem – enter Who Dares Wins, from Ali, Shane and Steve (other arrangements may be available!). 

I got to play with a prototype of this puzzle at an MPP several moons ago – I remember saying good things about it and encouraging Shane to make some more copies of it, mainly so that I could add one to my collection… ‘cos it made me smile when I solved it…

Some time later, the lads sent me a production version in the mail and boy had things changed! The form-factor was totally unrecognisable: now a handsome black cylinder with some brass accents around the waist and a brass lock peaking out the one end with Shane’s trademark signature stamped into the metal… it looks brilliant!

It comes with a rather pedestrian-looking key, the sort that you might bump into on a night out with the lads, albeit attached to a custom keyring complete with nameplate and goal neatly laid out. You have no excuses!

Of course introducing the key to the lock makes some very satisfying clicky noises, but seemingly does virtually nothing to actually unlock the puzzle… this is Haleslock 6! Your latest challenge has arrived…

Everyone already knows that Shane is an absolute whizz at designing and crafting puzzle locks. He is also a rather good solver and student of the solve, and of the solver, and as a result he knows how puzzlers think, so don’t be surprised if he ends up occasionally using that against you…

This puzzle has a wonderfully elegant solution, some surprising twists along the way, and a proper laugh out loud moment when you solve it. (I defy you not to laugh at that bit…you’ll know!) This puzzle screams “COLLABORATION!” – there are some clear touches from both the Monkeys and from Shane – and the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts.

It’s way better than the prototype – this one didn’t just make me smile, it made me laugh out loud! 

....get one! You'll love it...

MPP LCIIV

(Insert own favourite Roman Numeral here)

Traditionally the first MPP after an IPP has at least one full set of all of the exchange puzzles (and assorted other treasures from the Puzzle Party) so that anyone who wasn’t able to make it along to IPP can still have a bash at the puzzles, so I schlepped four crates of puzzles along in honour of that tradition.

When I arrived at the hall I got a bit of a fright when I found someone already set up and about to host eight expecting couples to talk them through the impending changes their bundles of joy would be bringing… after a short chat, and a bit of checking on bookings we realised she should have been in the lounge, not the hall, so with impeccable timing, Ali and the London gang arrived to help move all her carefully prepared information stations into the room down the corridor… (thank guys!) while the rest of us set about getting some tables and chairs (and several hundred puzzles) out for some puzzling.

I’d come across a 3D printed variant of Frabjous called Stellated-Dodecathing (fab name!) on Printables and spent a few days printing out vast quantities of the requisite bits for some assembly fun… several folks had a bash at assembling them and helped me out by taking a copy home – I ended up with a single copy – so one of my crates was a lot lighter than when I’d arrived. I’d also 3D printed a large pile of Ken’s Fool’s Cube that I’d really enjoyed playing with at IPP. The premise is simple: you race with a friend to assemble a cube from the pieces on the keychain and then return them to the start position on the keychain… along the way there’s a wonderful moment when you realise that you might have just done something silly… and right about then you realise why everyone’s looking at you and grinning. It’s a really fun puzzle that I hope everyone else enjoyed as much as I did the first time Ken caught me out with it in Houston. (Thanks Ken!!)

I managed to get rid of several piles of puzzles various folks had asked me to bring back from Houston for some local(-ish) puzzlers, as well as a small pile of my spare exchange puzzles.

There was a bit of fun with the Stellated Dodecathings when Steve discovered that the void inside it would fit not only a copy of his Lone Star Burr, but also all of the cash we’d collected so far to cover the hire of the hall, as long as it was rolled up very tightly… which meant that at the end of the day I had a small collection of sterling notes all neatly rolled in straw-like structures - that didn’t look dodgy at all!

Michel managed to join us from a not-so-near camp-site where his family were currently holidaying and enjoying the best of the British summer (his expectations had clearly already been lowered and they were having a great time!). He’d been visiting all of the charity and puzzle shops he could find along the way and ended up giving me a copy of the Hi Q Eureka domino tray-packing puzzle and a Rubik’s fidget cube that he’d picked up in spite of already having copies of his own – thank you sir!

Lewis joined us for his first MPP experience (hopefully we didn’t put him off!) bringing along a prototype of his next Stickman collaboration – a Gordian Knot variation. He sportingly let me have a play with it and I managed to show just how much I’ve forgotten of the solve for that wonderful little puzzle… I managed to string together a few moves and confirm that he really has managed to recreate the look and play of the original puzzle rather expertly – he’s added a bit of twist on the original right at the end of the solve - so I have no idea what that is… but I suspect that Rich might have got very close to solving it later on back at my place.

Dale was dishing out his own variations on a set of coin and matchstick challenges that had several of us scratching our heads for quite a while, in fact I’m still stumped by several of them more than a week on!

During the course of observing Oli assembling a copy of the Stellated Dodecathing I made a startling scientific discovery: my first observation of Anti-Think(c) – Oli was connecting up sets of arms to the corner connectors and he had managed to connect them all perfectly wrong – there are two possible ways of adding an arm to a connector and he had managed to literally offer up every single arm he’d connected in the wrong orientation… if he’d just randomly bashed them together you’d have expected about half of them to be wrong and the others to be right, even by accident; but Oli had contrived to connect every single one of them wrong without even realising there was a right and a wrong way… something we could only put down to a hidden super power – Oli’s Anti-Think(c). Remember you read about it here first!

Oli had brought Jack along for a day’s puzzling and have to say that Soos-the-younger appeared to be a pretty gifted solver of sliding tile puzzles – who knows what that says about nature versus nurture!

Adin joined us for several hours puzzling and then gamely took home a copy of George’s Hex Screws that I had left over from the previous MPP – and barely a week later he’d assembled the first of the two challenges! (For the record, my copy was assembled by Rich – there is no way in heck I could get that thing together!)

I disappeared off home at lunchtime to let the hounds out and grab a sandwich while the others headed down to the High Street for the pig rolls that weren’t there… there were kebabs though…

Sometime after lunch Frank texted to say that he wouldn’t be coming as he was going to have a nap rather… too much excitement perhaps, or perhaps there was more to that story – I’m sure he’ll tell you if you ask him- I just remember that he chose to take a nap over coming to MPP.

I had a great time exploring Dan’s copy of Chained Key puzzle – I felt sure I was making great progress until I got thoroughly stopped in my tracks – I spent a while trying to get around the virtual roadblock without success before Dan admitted that he’d been stuck at precisely the same spot… something that seemed to catch everyone else out over the course of the rest of the day… a couple of days later he told me he’d conquered it and I found myself buying a copy from Luke’s website. It’s a great little puzzle!!

Later in the afternoon I spent a while totally embarrassing myself when I tried Dan’s own design for a second time… I spent ages chasing the things in the wrong dimension and made an absolute hash of the solve, possibly helping him to convince himself that he didn’t need to make it any harder than it already was!

We packed up some time after 5 and then headed back to my plaice for the traditional cod and chips. Hugo the Hippo and a bunch of the older Stickmans came out to play while Steve updated his social media profile. Several Minima’s and some recent Pelikan’s stoutly resisting solving… it was a good evening after another fun day’s puzzling with my mates – thank you folks!

 

Shelly

Doog and Radek have been at it again…

Radek began teasing the imminent arrival of a new Demonticon on social media about two months ago and initially we’d hoped to be able to take an early copy to IPP to amuse that bunch of puzzlers… Shelly ended up taking a little longer to arrive on the scene and I secured a copy at the first sign of her availability – she arrived a couple of days later thanks to a wonderfully efficient courier company.

Shelly looks brilliant with a definite oil-barrel chic about her. There’s a bright eye, a slightly wonky vacant eye and a pursed grin defying you to find what the future holds. The lads rate her as “mischievous - many components, slightly obscured mechanism” so we know we’re in for an interesting ride!

I spent a while exploring and found a couple of things to amuse myself with fairly quickly… I even thought I might be making some pretty rapid progress as Shelly began to open up to me, but any thoughts that Shelly might be a bit of a pushover were quickly dispelled when my progress was halted and I ended up spending several days making absolutely zero progress.

Eager to hear what I thought of Shelly, the lads reached out and I found myself embarrassed by having to report virtually no progress… if I was embarrassed the first time, the next time they asked was pretty mortifying as I’d made literally no further progress at all.

While I was describing what I had tried and failed, there was a little encouragement that led me back to something I’d tried very early on and discounted on the grounds that it seemed to need more force than I thought the boys would ask of their solvers. Revisiting it, and optimising my approach a little, yielded some movement and, more importantly, the encouragement I needed to believe in myself – the game was back on…

From there I really enjoyed the absolute romp through the remaining puzzling bits – there’s some really clever use of interesting tools, and one of the most exquisite little tools I’ve ever come across in a puzzle – it’s delightful and perfect for the job at hand…

The final reveal, in addition to the theming along the way is excellent as we’ve come to expect from getting inside the minds of these Demonticons… Shelly is definitely a barrel of laughs (and a nice little puzzle challenge as well!).

Get into the Spirit

I’m sure the other exchangers in this year’s Edward Hordern Puzzle Exchange won’t be too offended if I describe this as the stand-out exchange puzzle this year… an absolute thing of beauty inspired by the man behind Boxes and Booze and superbly crafted by that bloke at Pacific Puzzles - Steve Canfield and Lee Krasnow set the bar(!) incredibly high on this one…

Inside the green velvet pouch nestles a shiny aluminium cocktail shaker - the only potential giveaway that this might not be just an actual cocktail shaker is the wooden trim around the waist- that and the lack of a cap on the top… this one absolutely looks the part!

Your goal is to free the commemorative coin that you can catch a glimpse of fairly early on in the solve - however it remains annoyingly out of reach until the very end!

The first move is probably best described as a bit of a “gimme!” - you’re going to find it and then you’re going to have a bit of an intake of breath when you start seeing some of the bits lying in wait for you… it looks impressive!

I spent quite a while getting nowhere at this point. I’d fiddle with this and with that, and not find anything useful… but the whole time I found myself absolutely enchanted by this object’s gorgeousness, so spending time in one spot isn’t really much of a chore!

It took me quite a while to find the next step, and of course immediately realised I was overcomplicating things as usual… it’s an elegantly simple mechanism…

Right about now things began to get really interesting, and while progress started to come thick and fast, some pretty weird stuff was happening… at one point I didn’t think things through and ended up cursing that man Canfield… and I’m sure I wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last! (Feel free to have a laugh at my expense, mate - well-played!!)

Freeing the coin provides a nice reward and a little hit of dopamine…I spent a while enjoying that hit (they don’t come that frequently, so I need to make the most of them!) and then duly found myself getting tripped up all over the show when I set about resetting the puzzle - it probably took me three or four goes to get everything back in the right place - and each time I cursed that man Canfield… if you know, you know… :-)

This is an awesome puzzle - plenty of discovering is required and a good deal of Think-(c)-ing needed too… this is going to be the Big Ben of 2024. Chapeau gentlemen!

Houston, we had a problem here

When Brian Young recently announced that he was retiring from full-time puzzle-making, I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in the puzzling world hoping that he wouldn’t be going full-on cold-turkey and that we’d occasionally still see something interesting popping up from him…

Cue sitting around at IPP41 and Brian says “Here, what do you think of this?” passing over a familiar looking box, that upon closer inspection isn’t familiar at all! Brian’s taken the shell of a standard MI Toys puzzle box and ripped out all of the puzzle-bits… and then replaced them with a little something of his own design – a bit like Kelly Snache’s up-cycling of old tea and cigar boxes.

Brian’s result is a gorgeous looking creation with the majority of an acrylic maze on display inside the box and most of the usual decoration from the original box still there on the outside… there’s a little extra lasered text differentiating it from the original donor puzzle – if the acrylic maze in the new window wasn’t sufficient.

The blurb on the box gives you the usual warnings [no external tools, no hitting and no gaffer tape (really, we need to say that now?!)] and then goads you into opening the box while noting that gravity may be more of a hindrance than a help… great!(Makes mental note to turn on local gravity field displacement device.)

A bit of inspection shows there’s a little ball bearing in that acrylic maze, so clearly you know what you have to do… and that kept me amused for a while, until I ran out of things to do and all the things I’d tried weren’t exactly being useful… so after a little thought, and some experimentation, and reminding myself of the devious fellow behind this bit of up-cycling, I found some really interesting things… and then a whole new world opened up to me – now we’re away to the races!

…and there I stopped, making no further progress – but having done enough that I know I want a copy and I tell Brian that – and I think he allows himself a bit of a smile knowing that he’s stopped me dead in my tracks…

I secure a copy from him at the puzzle party and then have a chance to play with it back at home a couple of weeks later… I can easily retrace those initial steps and find myself back in the same spot once again – thoroughly confuzzled.

A little Think(c) and a fair amount of experimentation until a little more Think(c) makes me ask myself “What if I could…” and that brings a new avenue to explore… and while it doesn’t seem nearly as intricate, it’s doing something new, and that’s usually good thing on a solve…

It is a good thing, and I open the box and get to see all the innards that had me stumped in each of the phases – they’re all elegantly simple, and nicely devious… just the sort of thing that you’d expect from Mr Puzzle himself.

Here’s hoping that Brian’s experiments in retrofitting his own mechanisms into donor boxes continues because this one’s a cracker!

[Brian had a small run of these available for sale at IPP41 - they were all sold.]