MPP IIXIIXIIXIIXIIXII

Normal service is resumed: Louis and Mieke fly in on Friday evening and we get a few hours to catch up on stuff before a few of us feel the need for some sleep – I set up Louis in the study with a line of puzzles and leave him puzzling while I go and crash.

Next morning a good number of them have shifted position; and state – Louis has triumphed… we grab some breakfast and pack up the car before heading down to the hall via the shops to grab the drinks and milk for the day… where we find Ali grabbing himself some breakfast.

Down at the hall there’s already a few puzzlers waiting in the parking lot where it’s clear we aren’t sharing the facilities with the antenatal group this time so there’s more parking for puzzlers.

I open up the hall and everyone lends a hand to drag all the stuff inside and get the tables and chairs set up… the boiler takes a while to get the water up to temperature so one or two cups of lukewarm coffee are made before the good stuff comes online. I wait patiently and it’s plenty warm enough.

I’ve printed off a couple of sets of George Bell and Nan Ma’s co-ordinate motion dodecahedron assembly kits and there’s some early interest in them. A few folks end up having a bash at some of the assembly challenges with Robin coming out on top with a pair of assembled dodeca’s from a single set… he’s definitely earned his set! The others appear to have found a home as well although I suspect someone may not have taken the accompanying paperwork with the write-up and challenges… you can grab a copy off Printables if you need it.

Alan Lunsford (he of brilliant small 3D-printed SD puzzles-fame) had recently published a few TIC designs so I couldn’t resist trying them out myself, and having done that, decided I should print off ten copies of each to give away – they’re great designs: not many pieces – it’s pretty clear where everything needs to end up, it’s just the getting them there that takes a little bit of Think(c). They turned out to be very popular!

I’d also taken along my Puzzle Potato Houdini Box and the new Jesse Born Sq_d puzzle… the former hooks people beautifully with the first (un-)locking mechanism and it’s a romp from there through – I tended to keep an eye on their progress and nudge them into focusing on the right place from time to time to ensure enjoyment. SQ_d had a few challengers as well and the menacing voice got exercised several times over the day with the treasure popping out at least a couple of times.

Carlos came back for a second visit, bringing along his son Lewis this time… the lad threw himself into a bunch of different sorts of puzzles and seemed to be having a whale of a time – according to Carlos afterwards he’s sold and will definitely be back for more – excellent! Another new convert… :-)

Carlos had brought along a number of different animal-shaped puzzles that Steve spent a while playing with and at the end of the afternoon Carlos gifted me a burr he’d designed where the pieces each break down into a number of smaller bits… a nice idea well implemented as the bits all stay together when the burr is assembled but will spontaneously disassemble once the burr is taken apart… some dexterity required.

Pelikan’s Cabinet from their previous release proved to be a very popular plaything – the first drawer’s nice but everyone absolutely loves the second drawer! IYKYK :-)

I’d taken my copy of I Need My Lunch along and got another nudge from Ali on what to try next… I’m glad I did because there’s no way I’d have thought of trying that… I made a little more progress that day but ended up hitting another brick wall which remained solidly in place until Louis gave me some coaching the next morning… (No, I’m not ashamed – that thing is INCREDIBLE!)

The orderly horde headed up to the main road for pig rolls (etc.) and I managed to pick up some meat for the braai we were planning for Sunday afternoon with the Coolens. The pig rolls were up to their usual standards and the banter in the room next door was typically dire so we all enjoyed ourselves.

Kevin brought along another bunch of imminent Pelikan puzzles for our enjoyment and I decided that I definitely needed a copy of the new Minima from Volker…

The Entity Containment Device had a good playing with but I was surprised that the assembled experts didn’t just power straight through it… everyone was pretty complimentary of the quality of the puzzles and the challenge they offered so I suspect that Nothing Puzzles will find a welcoming audience for their future puzzles.

Lewis (E) arrived just after lunchtime to personally deliver a handful of Pin the Pebbles and settled down for some puzzling and banter – he seemed to be enjoying himself so hopefully he’ll become a regular!

Steve and Ali were passing around a prototype of a new puzzle from Doog – a rectangular lump of aluminium with a protruding brass pin that appeared to be sprung… several of us had a good old try on it and got literally nowhere. Rich did manage to make some progress although I found it very straight-forward to undo all of his progress and then got absolutely nowhere. Louis spent a while with it and duly whipped out the brass rod before he and the monkeys disappeared off to a quieter part of the establishment for a discussion / debrief / debugging. When Doog asked me how I’d got on the next day he seemed disappointed that I hadn’t solved it but not surprised that Louis had…

Robin spent a good chunk of the afternoon assembling what appeared to be a complex magnetic assembly – no idea what the final assembly will look like but it’s made up of a huge number of small plastic bits with a shed-load of magnets glued into them… most of the magnets ended up glued in place, albeit by the end of the day he had accumulated a fair amount of superglue on both his hands and the table – the price of art, eh?

When we were down to the stayers, we tidied up the hall and headed up to Puzzling Times HQ for more puzzling and pizzas. (It turns out I’m lazy and Domino’s will deliver – that and my old mate no longer runs the fish and chip shop and it’s not the same anymore…)

Several of the treasures came out to play with the Clutch Box and the Cricket Bat both getting a good playing with… along with a large number of interesting Karakuri boxes. One of Chinny’s old pencil specials (La Boomba!) get’s an outing but some of the hot glue seems to have given up over the intervening years so it’s not quite as challenging a puzzle as it once was… the batteries have also faded so the boom wasn’t there either. Louis takes it in hand on Sunday and whips it back into shape with the help of a bit more fresh glue and some new batteries and it’s hopefully ready for another decade’s punishment.

There’s the traditional gathering in the kitchen to put the entire world to rights and we feel like we’ve managed to reset things sufficiently until the next MPP is due to roll around…

The travellers leave at a suitably modest time and I turf out some of the locals when Gill decides she’s heading off to bed as we’ve all had a pretty long day, and Gill and I are still getting over the last dregs of our respective colds…

I set Louis up with a pile of puzzles and head off to bed myself.

Next morning sees more of the puzzles solved and after a nice chatty breakfast Louis and I throw ourselves into the puzzles once more…

I get some encouragement on my T15 where I’ve been stuck for a while and Louis tells me I’m doing all the right things… so I try again and then give it one almighty yank and find the shackle opening – there is a neat and tidy technique but I suspect that most folks are going to use the yank and hope approach at that point.

I switch to I Need My Lunch and get the occasional bit of encouragement or nudging in the right direction and manage to finally find my lunch – it’s an incredible puzzle and I’m going to need to write more about it at some point, but for now it remains only half solved – I can’t find how to start the reset… again, if you know, you know…

I braaied for lunch and we sat outside to enjoy the fruits of my burning only for the rain to start and for us to have to scuttle inside to avoid a drenching.

A few more hours puzzling before I dropped the visitors at the airport to start their journey homeward.

It was brilliant getting to spend time with my puzzling mates and also to get the excuse to spend a good chunk of time playing with puzzles with my friends… life is good!

 

Entity Containment Device trilogy

[I have ZERO affiliation with Nothing Puzzles - I just like their work!] 

A while back I decided to take a bit of a punt on a Kickstarter from a new puzzle designer Down Under called Nothing Puzzles. The Entity Containment Device trilogy was pitched as a set of related puzzles leading to a final lock – it sounded intriguing enough at the time and the mock-ups looked pretty decent, so I thought “Why not?!!” Along the way a couple of fidget toys were added into the mix and the whole thing duly arrived a few weeks ago.

I was very impressed with the packaging – the outer carboard box looks brilliant and protects things in transit and inside there’s a custom-printed frame that supports all of the puzzles and stops them from bashing into one another during their postal adventures… everything arrived looking neat and tidy in their proper spots.

I got to spend a couple of hours playing through them recently and really enjoyed them… each of the puzzles is very nicely 3D printed and makes use of quite a lot of hardware to connect things and provide some puzzly elements… the printing is top-notch and the guys haven’t stinted on quality anywhere. Each of the puzzles has a good solid heft to it that inspires confidence and you know that things are just going to work properly when you’ve found the right way to attack each element of the series.

The three initial elements all stand on their own and can be tackled in any order. I chose to tackle them in numerical order just because I could, not due to any form of OCD whatsoever(!).

Each of the puzzles provides a really great solve journey: from trying to find anything that moves initially, then trying to get that to be vaguely useful, invariably finding some tools, some of which are obviously quite tool-y and some that may well be a little disguised, before dramatically disassembling things and wondering how the heck you’re going to remember where everything came from and in what order.

By the time you solve each of them you will have a goodly pile of pieces and a very clear key piece for that final lock. Collect enough of those and you can unlock the final lock and uncover a little unsettling twist in the tail… that’s not at all sinister.

One of the puzzles does an interesting little dance and sways this way and that while you’re manipulating things – it might feel a little chaotic but when you get it all open, I defy you not to marvel at the extent of the overengineering in there to make sure that everything stays properly in its lane and works just perfectly. The guys have done an excellent job of designing a fun set of puzzles and then properly overengineering things so that they’re going to carry on working perfectly through many, many rounds of solving.

I’m very glad I took a punt on these and will definitely be hopping on their next Kickstarter project. 

MPPP XXXXCIIV

Another fairly leisurely start to an MPP morning as my drive to the hall is definitely the shortest (by several hours!) yet the car park is already half-full when I get there. Turns out there’s an antenatal class in the hall next door, so we shuffle our cars Tokyo-style. Phil’s beaten me to it and it doesn’t take long for the gang to start arriving: Steve’s dragged Mike over from London, Chris and Chloe and Dale are all reasonably local and then Ali and the girls arrive from not that far away from Steve… and then there’s a positive cascade of puzzlers arriving from just down the road (Sam & Dale) and super-far-afield (Frank, Fraser and Kevin).

The puzzles are unpacked and there are two conspicuous plastic crates on a table in the centre of the hall with several hundred little pieces of printed PLA in them… two copies (plus some spare bits) of Oskar’s 840-piece Big Ball so that we can have a gently competitive assembly at some point during the course of the day… (Yes, I spent a couple of weeks printing them… each ball was just shy of 2 spools… and yes, sometimes I do question my life decisions!)

Ali has brought along several crates from Assisi for me – some of them empty, some of them filled with puzzles and books… oh, and a giant copy of my exchange puzzle that’s topped-and-tailed with Ali and Steve’s… that was never going to fit in my luggage. Thanks mate – you’re a life-saver!

Chris has brought along a prototype from Doog and I really enjoy fiddling with that – when I manage to get it apart, I’m gob-smacked by the simplicity of the innards – and then even more confused when I try and work out what the reset position needs to be. I suspect I end up spending longer trying to un-solve it than I have solving it… I send Doog some suitably encouraging words afterwards, just in case he needs further encouragement. Phil and Andrew seem to be big fans as well – which says a lot!

Somewhere around late morning I manage to encourage a couple of groups of people to have a bash at assembling the Big Balls pseudo-competitively… Dan and Chris decide on a strategy of organise-and-then-assemble, spending ages sorting all of the bits into piles and setting about building identical sub-assemblies from piles of pieces, adding to them only when one pile of pieces is exhausted. Steve, Mike and Chloe on the other hand favour the dive-in-and-just-build-it approach. They screech into an early lead, but some doubt creeps in when I give them a helpful(?) map of the pieces and they find several pentagons in their structure when the map shows only hexagons… the crisis of confidence is rapidly dismissed although the opposing team keeps asking them if that’s really wise… several hours and a spot of lunch later, Chris and Dan’s methodical approach turns out to be quite a bit more efficient and they are declared victors… so Steve’s team began to seek alternative strategies for winning, including at one point trying to become the first team to complete the ball while having a puzzler inside it – at least I think that’s what they were tying to do… I was too afraid to ask in case that made me complicit.  

Kevin has brought along the imminent crop of Pelikan puzzles and several of us have a bash at them… I really like Surround Wil – it’s a nice level of fun puzzling! Fatomino sees several challengers step up to the plate but I don’t recall seeing anyone claiming victory – I’m sure that just means I wasn’t around at the precise moment I should have been… not that it's a really hard new puzzle form Volker!

Tamsin spends a while working her way through The Wonderbox of Alice and she seemed to enjoy it over an extended period, not particularly helped by my not being able to remember anything useful about it whenever she asked me for a hint.

The orderly queue for the pig rolls did not disappoint and lunch was the usual banter-rich experience.

Fraser had brought along a 3D printed copy of his Chained box that he ended up gifting me – and in spite of several attempts both at MPP and subsequently, said-box remains well-chained. Thanks Fraser!

Rich had brought along several of his own designs for folks to play with as well as a number of 3D prints of some less-available little packers – those ended up being pretty popular with several folks taking the opportunity to solve some hard-to-find puzzles. Elbow Room ended up taking me a LOT longer than it should have, but it was a really delightful solve.

Rich has a go on my copy of Doog’s latest box and he literally races through it… even the bit I’ve been stuck on for weeks since IPP. My brain has clearly gone to mush as I actually ask him for a nudge on that bit and I find I still cannot solve it afterwards… perhaps it’s time to start restricting myself to simpler puzzles?

Mike had a copy of his latest award-winning design – a tray-packer / vanishing area puzzle that he’s distilled down to a pretty efficient, horribly challenging puzzle. Several puzzlers tried and most ended up just being happy that they could return it to the unsolved assembly with the crumb outside the frame. I spent a long time getting to know it before heading off to Assisi and can confirm it is an absolute sod!

Stephen dropped in for a couple of hours in the afternoon and seemed to enjoy being able to fiddle with some puzzles among friends for the first time in a couple of years as a result of the arrival of his first son a couple of years ago – good to see you again, mate!

Later in the afternoon the Big Balls ended up getting subjected to more and more enthusiastic playing across the hall. At first the kids were having a whale of a time rolling them back and forth, but then the bigger boys decided that looked like fun and Steve managed to find the precise strength of kick that would just manage to partially disassemble said ball… now you know why I printed some spare bits!

Sometime after 5pm we packed everything up and headed up to Puzzling Times HQ – along the way discovering just how many cars a Big Ball won’t fit into, but “delighted” that it would fit into the front seat of mine… so much for my sneaky plan to find takers for them so I wouldn’t end up with another huge ungainly puzzle that I need to find a spot for in one of the puzzle caves… at least Ali took one of them!

There were some deep philosophical conversations in the kitchen where the world was duly put to rights, a large stack of pizzas were demolished, several Karakuri boxes were enjoyed, my Angel Box was solved and then (properly) reset and Rich insisted on solving my copy of Juno’s House which Ali had given me earlier in the day. I shouldn’t say that I was pleased when he didn’t just solve it straight-away, but I suspect that after a week of playing with it myself, I’m no further than he was after about half an hour with it… this one’s a toughie!

Thanks to everyone who made the trek to Barnt Green for another grand day’s puzzling with my friends.