Box 1

Phil Wigfield’s been hand-crafting stunning brass puzzles for ages and he’s had a bit of an itch that he’s been wanting to scratch for a while now: he’s wanted to make a puzzle box… he’s been talking about it on and off and the stars have eventually aligned…

Enter Box 1, a handsome little brass box with a definite Rocky Chiaro vibe about it – which shouldn’t be surprising given just how much the master of brass has inspired our Phil! 

Phil was originally going to call it “Simple Box” as he reckoned that would describe it best… which is interesting because I found the solve anything but…

Back at DCD he’d told us he was planning to tee up some boxes shortly, and then four weeks later he rocked up to MPP with enough copies for anyone who wanted to buy one – which, given the amount of work that goes into each of these little guys, is phenomenal!

I handed over some cash and popped the little black velvet bag into one of my crates to play with the next day (ironically, I always get more puzzling time the day after an MPP for some reason).

It’s a handsome little lump of brass with a prominent hinge and a neatly decorated lid that literally won’t budge – if you put this on a shelf next to your Rocky puzzles, nobody would bat an eyelid – it looks the part.

I spent far too long solving this one! …and when I eventually did and examined the locking mechanism, I was astonished at just how elegant it is – elegant and delightfully exacting – as long as you do exactly the right thing, it will open perfectly, but if you do anything else in between, you will be doomed to fiddle aimlessly for ages… kind of like I did… I definitely got value for money on this solve.

Open the box and you’ll find Phil’s signature and your serial number - #2 for me – Oh and a word to the wise: solve over a table… you’ll thank me!

An excellent first box from Phil – I suspect a lot of us would love there to be a whole series, but judging by the amount of work that Phil’s realised go into these little masterpieces, I’m not totally convinced there’ll be a lot more of them…

Nice 1, Phil!!

MPP LCIIII

[I think that's what I ended up calling it on the day...]

This one starts with a Friday 5pm airport run to collect three blokes from The Netherlands and a chap from Bulgaria… I time the first arrival almost perfectly and the Dutch contingent isn’t too far behind and soon enough we’re all piled into Gill’s Mini heading for Barnt Green. <…begging the question “How do you fit 5 puzzlers in a Mini?”>

The hounds give the visitors a very warm welcome before we chuck some pizzas in the oven and settle down to some dinner. After dinner the puzzles come out and there’s a familiar buzz of puzzlers chatting and challenging one another with their current favourite puzzles.

Stefan’s been printing more of his tiny puzzles and he gives me a copy of the Kostick’s RDS Interlock that is 9.5mm across… and yes, it is actually a fully working copy, complete with the spare plates for anyone stupid enough to want to try some of the additional challenges. Stefan’s 3D printing skills at this scale are truly remarkable… he also insists on gifting me a full-size copy to replace the one I gave to James a couple of weeks ago… thank you, sir!

Wil gives me a really cute stand for my Butterfly Puzzle from a Belgian friend of his – complete with a puzzling compartment to store the extra tool that I've never taken out of it's sealed home… ;-) That’s going to display the puzzle really nicely in the Strijbos section of The Hoard. Thanks Wil!

We puzzle until sometime around midnight Dutch time and then I run the boys down to their Airbnb and head home to crash.

Next morning, Stefan and I grab some breakfast and load up the Mini with a few crates of puzzles before swinging by the boys to collect them on the way to the hall. Soon after we get there the puzzlers begin descending from all around the countryside. We have the usual bunch from London-ish, several folks from up north, including Fraser from north of The Wall. Andrew represents the south and there’s even a couple of us from the Midlands – there must be about 25 of us all told by the time everyone’s arrived – a goodly bunch!

I’ve done my usual thing of printing off a bunch of spare copies of puzzles that I’ve ben toying with recently and leave them in a pile for anyone who wants a copy… Dan and I both end up giving away a bunch of George Bell’s Second Stellations and I manage to get rid of a pile of sundry Barcode Burrs that Louis and I had managed to partially assemble the night before after the essential hardware for assembling them got delayed in the post. [We really are incredibly fortunate to have designers like Lee and George who’ve happily published their designs for anyone to print their own copies and give them away.] By the end of the day I’m down to one last copy of Second Stellation that has now been added to The Hoard.

Steve gives me a box with a few recent arrivals from Japan and an incredibly generous gift and refuses to take any money for the Japanese goodies – thanks mate! At least I can reciprocate and give him a copy of Yuu Asaka’s Jigsaw 28, but I’m still well in his debt.

Wil has a large table of his wares displayed and there’s the usual knot of puzzlers around the table pretty much all day sampling the wares and buying things – I mean, where else can you pick up a new copy of his Butterfly Puzzle and a display stand for it? He has copies of his recent exchange puzzles and plenty copies of his new Bottle Puzzle and he’s giving away copies of his latest symmetry puzzle that still has me puzzled from my DCD trip…

Richard has brought along a large selection of his 3D printed puzzles – including a number of Happiness Cubes – nicely printed in matching colours with their names neatly printed on one side. I think he’s gone and done something clever to import the data in an efficient manner in order to generate all the pieces and add all the finishing touches auto-magically – he’s a clever lad! <Correction: he's not a clever lad - he did it all by hand and clearly enjoys dull repetitive jobs!>

I spend a while playing with a couple of identical looking 5-piece burrs – one is a design he stumbled across [Switchboard Burr by Jim Gooch] and the other is his variation on it that removes a potential false solution and forces a really interesting series of moves that I don’t think I’ve seen on another burr… but don’t take my word for that as I’m not really a burr-guy!

During the course of the day several folks have a bash at Rich’s puzzles and generally find them rather hard to reassemble so a growing pile of pieces begins to form on Rich’s table – and then at some point some slightly more mischievous puzzlers remember the Immense Happiness that resulted from disassembling a large number of Happiness Cubes and leaving them all in a big pile. During the course of the day there must have been at least ten puzzlers contributing to the growing pile of pieces to challenge Rich. Things went badly downhill when one of the Monkeys decided it would be even more fun if some of the pieces were hidden – so a veritable arms-race ensued of Rich trying to count the pieces into one of his crates (to ensure he had a multiple of six and might be reasonably sure that he had all the bits he needed) while Steve tried to thwart that by adding or removing handfuls of bits… no puzzlers were harmed in the making of this mayhem.

Fraser played Santa inviting everyone to reach into his sack and help themselves to one of his balls – little white ones with a clear centre line and some ball bearings visible inside… several folks had a fiddle with his balls in the hall but I didn’t spot anyone solving them there – which I suspect made Fraser very happy. I got to play with mine the next morning and really enjoyed the solve – although I was surprised by just how much came out of that little ball when I did solve it… to the point that I found resetting it almost as challenging as the solve. Nice one Fraser – those balls are very nicely put together - and thank you!

Mike had brought along a bunch of Coremods’ new dexterity puzzles and several folks had some particularly choice words when they picked up one or two of them – my particular favourite was when folks noticed that the cake spun on its axis – at which point the most common reaction was “…kinell!” followed shortly thereafter by picking up a different puzzle. One or two of them managed to stay solved long enough for folks to admire them but generally the act of picking them up was more than enough to reset the little blighters! (I expect that will bring the designer a good degree of satisfaction!)

Phil had brought along a puzzle box he’d been working on and he did a fairly swift trade on the few copies he’d brought along. I took one for The Hoard and got to play with it on the Sunday morning – and there’s some very nice camouflage and misdirection in there – as always Phil’s machining is excellent!

Adin had brought several copies of his new design “Burr.exe ERROR” that looks absolutely brilliant – although his description of it as “just a caged burr” is really underselling it! He’s really embraced getting a 3D printer and his design mojo has clearly ramped right back up again… he’s produced a thoroughly intriguing six-piece burr trapped at a funky angle in a solid base… with some great detailing on the bases given some of the instructions… great job that man!! (I really enjoyed that solve on the Sunday as well – it’s a really nice solve where the “cage” does an unexpectedly good job of restricting things!

I managed to totally throw my name away when I told Steve I hadn’t managed to solve the latest puzzle he’d got for me from Endo-san… I’d managed to convince myself that the drawer could be extended in literally any direction and orientation, but I couldn’t find a cunning way to separate the two pieces in the couple of months that I’ve had the puzzle… at which point Steve pointed out that it wasn’t really a puzzle, just an interesting mechanism that amused Endo-san… the two parts didn’t come apart after all… and if I’d translated the Japanese description, I’d have saved myself several hours over the course of the last few months. [Insert own smart R’s comment here.]

Chris managed to lower the tone (quite an achievement given some of the folks there!) by renaming my latest Karakuri purchase while Steve has trying to solve it, reducing several of us to giggling school children for quite a while – and I’m never going to be able to look that little otter in the eye again without raising a smile.

Kevin had brought along a couple of Aaron’s diabolical creations and none of us was surprised when they remained thoroughly unsolved during the course of the day. He also brought along a bunch of the recent Pelikan creations and gifted some spare copies to a couple of us – thanks a stack for my copy of Fabrick!

It was great to see Shane after a bit of an absence due to the day job intervening – he’s always an absolute scream – and his surprised reaction whenever he solves anything is hilarious! Great to see you again, Shane!

Steve had a brainwave and brought along a bunch of puzzles he needed help identifying and that seemed to go quite well until the little bits of paper with the names/designers on them mysteriously vanished at some point… although I think they may have turned up later after Steve mentioned that he managed to remember all of the names that had been scribbled on the notes… thus dramatically reducing the jeopardy! There was an element of jeopardy that remained as the puzzles themselves seemed to spontaneously disassemble at one point. I’m sure it wasn’t simply a case of payback!

We had about eighteen folks join us for the traditional fish supper back at our place afterwards so there was a fair amount more puzzling until folks began to drift homewards.

The Dutch contingent continued puzzling for another hour or two until the lateness of the hour made some of them need their beds a bit more than others, so I dropped them at their place and duly crashed.

Next morning I gave Stefan some breakfast and dropped him off at the airport for the start of his long journey home before collect the Dutch contingent one last time ahead of some more puzzling and a bit of lunch.

Louis provided his usual sterling service at solving some of the puzzles that have eluded me for far too long – yup, he made pretty short work of most of them – it’s fine! I’m not a proud man! LOL

One or two puzzles did remain unsolved, including Pitt’s Blocked in Box which has remained unsolved since July… I’m beginning to think it might be hard.

After lunch and a final round of chocolate tart I dropped the boys off at the airport for their afternoon flight… marking the end of another thoroughly enjoyable MPP weekend – thank you all for making it thus!

DCD 2024

A week after DCD I find myself in a little cottage on a farm in Cornwall… I’ve got a couple of crates of (mostly unsolved) puzzles and Gill is stitching a festive panel at the kitchen table, and more importantly, I have some time to scribble something about DCD - mainly so that I’ll remember the best bits...

Ali, Steve and Lily had driven across on the Friday and Frank joined them early the next morning after spending an hour and a half in an immigration queue in the middle of the night. My journey is relatively uneventful, albeit I end up stuck on the motorway for almost an hour en route to the airport as a result of an accident just up ahead… I manage to scarf a croissant and down a double espresso before getting on the plane that I was having visions of missing.

My flight arrives a bit early and I manage to find Phil in the station concourse and we wend our way to the hotel where I check in and dump most of my baggage before we head to Delft to find the monkeys, Frank, Lily and Louis for some lunch… at one point we’re having a four-way chat on messenger and the feedback from the three of them standing next to each other is something awful!

We find a suitable spot for cheese toasties and burgers and it doesn’t take long for the puzzles to cover the table… somehow we manage to actually eat our lunch and head off to Rob’s place more or less on schedule.

Even more puzzles come out to play at Rob’s and I manage to offload some copies of Ken’s Fool’s cube after a good race between Stefan and Yaccine… the little gotcha moment in the middle of the solve never fails to amuse with several folks in the audience knowing exactly what to expect and not being disappointed.

Wil has a new symmetry puzzle to torture us with… a few of the guys manage to solve it that afternoon… I am not one of the them, and indeed a week later I am still not counted among the solvers… I’ve taken a few really slow clocks for him - he spotted a UK website that sells clocks that tell you what day of the week it is (who knew?!) and I managed to get them in time to bring across for him and he seems happy with them…

Rob’s collection of wotsits comes out to tease and there’s plenty of hilarity at some of the questions, and indeed some of the answers, with some odd implements remaining entirely unidentified during the course of the evening. (For some reason there is an extended discussion of shoving a beer can up a chicken’s R’s…)

Rob orders in the traditional spread of pizzas and we feast merrily before puzzling a little more… the crowds begin thinning out and somewhere around 9 we pile into Louis’ car and an uber and head off to our 10pm escape room - the lads and Lily having done a couple of the city’s excellent escapes room that morning.

We duly sign up for the public execution but things go a little awry when Louis ends up being the star attraction and the whole thing goes Pete Tong. We do manage to free Louis (I’m sure there’s a cracking movie title in there somewhere) and then set about escaping from the prison ourselves… the rooms are excellently themed and there’s a total lack of gratuitous combination locks on everything that opens… there’s a single key to be found and used and several keypad door locks and the rest is pure puzzling… it’s a great room and we manage to get out with a few minutes to spare without getting too many nudges along the way…

Another uber and a ride in the Louis-mobile see us safely back to the hotel where I crash unceremoniously - the others spend a couple of hours shuttling between the bar, the outside area and the lobby as they get moved on as things close down… I’m happily in the land of nod while all that’s going on.

Next morning we meet for breakfast and head off to the college where I’m pleased to say there are already a large number of tables positively groaning under the weight of the puzzles looking for new homes. I dump my rucksack and my jacket in the corner and then spend a while wandering around and chatting to folks I haven’t seen for a while… that’s the best part of these get togethers.

I get rid of a few boxes of English chocolates one of my mates enjoys and we catch up on the past six months. Wil gives me a rather large lump of brass that I suspect will puzzle me for quite a while to come… I do a circuit of the tables and come across a copy of Perfect Entrance that I’d somehow contrived to miss out from Mine’s last round of puzzles and I’m chuffed to be able to stumble across a copy for sale.

Stefan has a table with copies of his stunning 3D printed versions of the Kosticks’ RDS Interlock puzzle - I pick up a copy in spite of already having one that he’d gifted back home because he’s done a very clever thing with the customised packaging - there’s a label sewn into the bag that shows the pieces and lists the various challenges - brilliantly done! [A few days later I find myself visiting James and gifting this copy to him and he’s delighted, not having seen Stefan’s stunning printing before… so I’ll need to grab another copy when Stefan comes across for MPP…]

Stefan is also giving away copies of his tiny Soma puzzles in a box… the prints are immaculate, and tiny… and I get to listen to Stefan explaining some of the intricacies of printing effectively at this scale… the bit that really stands out is Stefan using big hand gestures to describe all of the extraneous material around the tip of a 0.2mm printer nozzle and having to file down the tip so that there’s less heat mass at the tip itself, or it ruins the print! I grab a copy of both sizes and manage to use the included tweezers to pack the pieces into their boxes and seal them in place with their little dovetailed(!) lids.

Wil sells me a new box from JCC that we end up really enjoying at dinner later that day.

Later on in the day I spend a while at Jack’s table picking out a few of his latest creations that I don’t have yet, including a couple of new high level 18-piece burrs (Twinkle and Wink - we get the story behind them later in the afternoon at Jack’s lecture). Jack’s arithmetic is even worse than my own and he solidly refuses to take the right amount of money from me - thank you Jack.

Tony Fisher has a giant Golden Cube on his table - this year’s giant creation just for our amusement. Marcel and the Luxembourg contingent have a long row of tables piled high with puzzles from an early Isis puzzle still pristine in its wooden box through to a small crate full of Trevor Wood creations… it really is amazing what you can find available for sale at DCD.

Anneke Treep had a table full of crocheted tori and linked rings - part of her latest bit of research into crocheted mathematical structures - I couldn’t resist sending Gill a pic of the crocheted goodies at the puzzle gathering.

Lunch is the usual fare of soup, rolls and hotdogs… and there’s hot and cold drinks on tap all day long - you really can’t beat the value you get from the entry fee!

The afternoon lectures started with a really interesting lecture from Jack Krijnen on how he searches for interesting high level 18-piece burrs (his speciality!). He told us a lovely story about the most recent discovery coming just after he’d made up a batch of what he thought was going to be his best discovery of the year, only for it to be surpassed by Twinkle. There was an update on the World Puzzle Centre and a video of some naked puzzlers. Rob gave us his usual canter through some of the exchange puzzles with Diniar supplementing the descriptions with his insights.

After the lectures there was some more shopping and I managed to grab a few handfuls of cheap puzzles from Jack’s table to use as giveaways - I love giving new puzzlers a cop of “Build a House” where the aim is literally presented on the name card but it seems impossible to build. As per our earlier agreement, Jack let me pay sticker price for these, but then couldn’t help himself from throwing in a bunch of copies of Cruiser as well… thank you Jack, again!

The monkeys seemed to do a reasonable trade over the course of the day and hopefully the truck was a little lighter on the way back home.

With things winding down, we set about putting the hall back into the right format for school lunches and manage to move all the chairs and tables around without breaking any puzzle or indeed puzzlers in the process.

Louis lines up a table at the local Chinese restaurant for us and we duly wander down the road and take out some puzzles to play with - the alert reader may notice a theme here… Lily manages to launch a fork into Steve's drink without spilling a drop and we enjoy several rounds of the buffet (although Frank insists on having sweet and sour sauce on his banana fritters for some reason) and plenty of cold beverages before calling it a night and heading back to the hotel where we say goodbye to Louis who heads off to Eindhoven.

Back in the hotel bar there’s a nice chat about the weekend - with Frank admitting that this was just what he needed to top up his puzzling mojo again… DCD really is a great excuse for a weekend away with your puzzling mates from all around Europe.

Thanks to all of you for making it another great DCD!

Freeze 14

This may be a short blog post – but I am a MASSIVE fan of this puzzle!

I’ve been following the release of Yuu Asaka’s puzzles fairly closely since Louis gifted me a copy of Jigsaw Puzzle 29 just after IPP38… I’d enjoyed the roller coaster ride on 29, and pretty much enjoyed every single one of their designs since then… but Freeze 14 really is something else!

Eight larger frosted pieces and six small white pieces need to fit inside the simple octagonal tray… the frosted bits have some useful cut-outs and some less-useful protrusions – all of which seriously limit the ways you can put them together inside the tray – they do form a lovely snowflake-ish pattern in the tray which is very pleasing…

However, no matter how you try and combine and order the pieces, there’s never quite enough spaces for the little white bits… who knew that three little squares and three little circles would cause so much trouble?!

I end up spending quite a while experimenting with different orderings but somehow, I’m always one or more gaps short. I try and get creative, but that seems even less productive…

This process continues over the course of a couple of weeks as I dip in and out of trying to solve this puzzle… always at least one gap short and just not enough space to squeeze that final little white piece into place…

At some point I abandon all sense of orderliness and begin searching for what I can only describe as a truly chaotic solution – nobody said it needed to look like a lovely snowflake in a tray… that particular search path leads to even more frustration and sensing that my (not really-) “almost” solutions are nowhere near as good as they had been on the more orderly attempts, I abandon that search-space.

At some point, after an embarrassingly long time playing with this puzzle, I notice something interesting – it’s been there all along and I’ve just been studiously ignoring it – and it’s the key to a solution that is wonderfully elegant – making my chaotic experimentation all the more mortifying.

IMHO definitely the most pleasing A-Ha! yet from Yuu Asaka – after the initial period of experimenting and realising the obvious approach probably isn’t going to work, there are a few discoveries that unlock the path to a magnificently elegant solution.

 

Visiting the World Puzzle Centre

(Sorry, I can’t bring myself to spell it wrong!)

A couple of weeks ago I found myself heading down to Stansted to meet up with Peter, Ali and Louis – it turns out it’s quicker to fly to England and pick up a flight to Perugia if you happen to live in Eindhoven. We don’t find Peter until we head down to the gate and manage to solve the gate puzzle when Ryanair pull a last-minute gate-switcheroo without changing the boards down at the gate.

We head off a bit later than planned but Ryanair seem to have some spare time in their schedule and we land more or less on time… Louis’ passport sees him through in record time and the three Brits bring up the rear. We find Steve outside waiting for us – he’s come over a few days early and rented a car to fetch and carry us – nice man that he is…

The drive back to the castle is complicated a bit by the fact that the car’s satnav speaks Italian, the main motorway is shut for road works and everyone drives on the wrong side of the road. We manage to solve one of these when Ali fires up Google Maps on his phone but we still manage to miss a couple of turnoffs along the way… we end up having a wild ride through the Italian countryside but Steve gets us all safely to the castle.

We grab our bags and head indoors where we find Rox welcoming all of us. She shows us to our rooms – Steve and Louis are in the castle and Ali, Peter and I get to choose a room each in the hotel – Ali takes the twisty room, Peter the IPP Exchange room and I grab the Lego room.

We head back up to the castle where Rox has laid on a massive Italian feast for us – we navigate up to the dining room and set about enjoying a great dinner of homemade pizza and lasagne – just brilliant!

There’s a little time for puzzling, but somewhere around 1am I run out of steam and head off to my room to crash. I get a great night’s sleep and somewhere around 9am we regroup at the castle for breakfast.

After breakfast we spend some time puzzling… there’s work to be done on some polycube assemblies that form part of Jan Zoon’s massive Notre Dame – I remember seeing this one at DCD a number of years ago and seeing it up close & in bits, was way more impressive! This assembly represents about 6 month’s of Jan’s life and is made up of literally millions of little cubies all glued into unique assemblies – they in turn assemble into the building blocks that in turn build the Notre Dame… a couple of these blocks have become partially disassembled and need rebuilding… and that’s a massive job, it turns out, even if you have access to several copies of BurrTools. A few of us have a bash at it manually until Rox and Marie managed to procure a CD drive for George’s laptop – that ended up giving us access to Jan’s notes and enabled us to track down the appropriate virtual brick and rebuild it… despite that pithy(!?) description, that ends up taking us several hours!

At some point early in the afternoon the Van der Pols arrive and George and Rox take us on the official tour of the castle and the hotel… we start in Louis’ suite (apparently that’s the Apartment when he’s not in residence) and then head down into the dungeon – a great place for heavy metal chests and, of course, gold and dragons! We work our way along the basement, each taking a turn in the jail, before we reach a dead end – where there’s a tantalising bricked-up door-shaped spot in the wall heading to the basement of the hotel… (a couple of weeks later Facebook reliably informs me they’ve managed to break through and will now have a passage connecting the castle and the hotel. Huzzah!)

We head upstairs at the opposite end of the castle through the crystal room (currently in need of a new means of supporting the shelves) and then heading up the stairs past hundreds of boxes mounted in the stairwell with some truly awesome puzzles begging to be played with. (Peter obliges later on and even I join in on it.) The rooms are all lined with fabulous antique display cabinets all doing their damnedest to display the mainly wooden puzzles throughout the castle (where the humidity is pretty consistent given the depth of the castle walls which have effectively protected Panicale from invasion for centuries!) – the room we’d dined in the night before has a stupendous collection of wooden puzzle boxes in it – I think I spot an Apricot box on top of one of the cabinets – it’s probably safer up there!

At the end of the floor there’s a room crammed with some mind-blowing sequential discovery puzzles, from an Apothecary Chest through James’ old Scanavini cabinet right up to Tracey’s Mega Puzzle Mansion – the scale-model of their home in Boca – currently partially open and requiring some more serious puzzling – good thing we have Louis to help Steve.

The view from the tower on the top floor is incredible. (Note to my reader: I’m probably going to run out of superlatives at some point.) I find myself just standing there drinking it in several times over the course of the weekend.

The tour continues over at the hotel where George and Rox show us what they’re doing on the first floor to create a main suite for themselves… next to the gym and George’s new (clean) workshop which still looks pristine and must be almost ready to start receiving the collection of printers and laser cutters. Everything is set up to make this one almighty makerspace, in line with their aim of having a place where folks can come and collaborate and prototype new puzzling ideas on the spot… I’d say they’re going to achieve that in spades.

On the upper levels we run through the IPP Exchange Room – with narrow shelves around all of the walls holding (literally!) all of the IPP exchange puzzles (some were still in boxes but I think that by the time Steve and Louis left, they’re all out there!).

The Lego room has space for plenty of the wonderful kits still in their boxes, along with piles of general construction bits for folks to play… the Twisty puzzle room is jaw-dropping! Literally floor to ceiling shelves covered in every single twisty you could imagine – from the oldest ones to the very latest, and every single thing in between…

Next the plastic and electronic puzzles room is similarly jam-packed…

Down in the basement there are several rooms with map drawers and piles of boxes and some with just plain piles of boxes – in spite of the stupendous amount already out on display, there’s even more still waiting to be unpacked and displayed…

We work our way along the basement under the hotel into George’s dirty workshop – complete with direct access to the street outside for easy delivery of large quantities of lumber, or, frankly whatever takes his fancy… and up against one wall of the next room along there’s a tell-tale door-shaped arrangement of stone work in the wall begging to be attacked… (Yup: Italian artisans 1 – bricked up doorway 0).

With the tour complete, focus shifts back to getting Jan’s temple back together… Steve and I somehow manage to get the final two bricks assembled and Louis and Jan do a stellar job of assembling the temple from the various pre-prepared bricks… toward the end of the construction everyone is up in the tower watching, advising or making mischief – it is left as an exercise for the interested reader to determine which one was Steve. When we get near the top, the final towers take a couple of attempts and plenty of discussions of how common earthquakes really are in this neck of the woods (more than you might imagine, it turns out). The final bits go on and Jan looks really proud that his handiwork now has a forever home.

Rox and George treat us all to dinner at Gallo, one of several fine eateries in the town – Rox has ordered a bit of what they do best for everyone and it duly starts coming and keeps coming… the food is delicious but several of us find ourselves asking if there’s much more to come as we’re truly stuffed. It turns out there are just two more courses to go and we soldier through it… did I mention the food is fantastic?

After dinner we take the long route home, wandering around the other side of the town until we get to the base of the castle and Rox spends a while playing with the lights up in the tower and delivering various flags from around the world… much to our amusement – the kids are easily amused! There’s some more puzzling before I crash at a more sensible hour than the evening before.

Breakfast is a repeat of the day before with everyone surfacing at more or less the same time… after breakfast I resume working on Doog’s latest called Channel 13 – I’d spent some time on it the day before and made a little bit of progress, thankfully I’d managed to reset it so I gave myself another go on it in the morning… this time I got it into a position that seemed like it might not be reversible and I panicked a little and asked Doog if I’d done something silly… he laughed at me and said I probably hadn’t broken it… so I puzzled on and a short while later managed to complete the solve, and indeed reset it properly – fun puzzle!!

Ali, Steve and Louis set about completing the Mega Mansion solve after Steve and Nigel had done most of the initial work on it during a previous visit. There’s some serious heavy lifting of both the literal and figurative variety – heck there’s even some consultation of the solution notes and some backwardsing and forwardsing with Tracey before the Mansion quite literally opens up and yields the final challenges… much to Rox’s absolute delight.

There are a few personalised jigsaws and a serious construction project still to be tackled… the lads end up short-circuiting one particular bit of the solve to make it a whole lot more tractable for the next set of solvers but resetting it takes up the rest of the day and indeed some of the following(!).

While some of that’s going on I play with Perry’s latest offering that I’d missed out on in Houston and find it as delightful a solve as ever… Peter’s favourite phrase is “Perry has out Kawashima’d Kawashima” – and I find myself agreeing with that – it’s a wonderfully surprising little box that never let’s you just get into a rhythm and “know” where the next move is going to come from…

Lunch is a blur of delicious flatbread sandwiches before the puzzling resumes… and it is good.

The Millers head off to the opera with the Zoons and at a somewhat sensible hour we head off to the airport with Ali riding shotgun and providing navigational suggestions from Google – we end up retracing some of our steps from the trip out and make it to the airport in plenty of time, so we find a quiet corner, catch up on emails and enjoy a little more puzzling time.

Ryanair takes us back to Stansted a bit later than scheduled but I’m back in my car just before midnight ready for the two-hour drive home… the traffic is delightfully light and I‘m very glad I’ve had the forethought to take the Monday off work…

It really was a truly remarkable weekend – something I was reminded of when folks in the office asked me what I’d been up to over the weekend – “Been to Umbria to visit some friends who bought a castle and a hotel to house their puzzle collection” – that is never going to sound ordinary in any conversation.

Thanks to Steve for getting us organised and playing chauffeur and to Rox and George for being awesome hosts over the weekend…

I’ll be back…