MPP18

The eighteenth Midlands Puzzle Party just happened to coincide with the weekend before the start of Wimbledon this year … and a certain tennis-mad disentanglemeister just happened to be in town so he came along – actually we knew he was going to be in town and he’d be free that weekend so we organised it around him. 

Bernhard Schweitzer had been threatening to join us at an MPP for a while and this date suited him and then three Austrian mathematicians who’d found us on the inter-web decided they should come over and see what all the fuss was about. Add to that the Coolen-clan coming over from Eindhoven for a long weekend and the stage was set for a pretty puzzling weekend.

Louis and family arrived on the Thursday afternoon after stopping off at Blenheim Palace on the drive over and I collected Dick from the station on Friday afternoon. When we got back to my place we spent a couple of hours going through some things that Dick had brought over for me (some unusual Gillen locks and a few Chambers pieces I didn’t have as well as some wonderful puzzle texts). When we’d gone through the things I was expecting to see, he started pulling out various other little treasures, so I ended up adding a special handmade lock and a lovely trick penknife (the first in my collection – could this be another slippery slope?) to my collection … and then the entanglements started coming … so I ended up with a sack-full of those as well! 

It is fair to say that the shelves of puzzles-to-be-solved are now reaching capacity, so I either need to start solving them, pronto, or I need to allocate another shelf for them! 

 

Georg, Astrid and Bernhard (W) arrived from Austria (via Germany) that evening and I dropped them off at their B&B. Saturday morning was a pretty early start as Bernhard (S) was arriving from Germany and needed collecting from the airport before we all headed down to the local village hall for the official off at 10am. 

I made sure we got there a little early only to discover that a bunch of folks who’d come from a LOT further afield had beaten me to it… we got everything underway and then I headed off to the B&B to collect the mathematicians, who promptly embarrassed me with a puzzle I didn’t have (a beastly looking entanglement called Super G from Jean-Claude Constantin), a bottle of nectar and a box of sweets. By the time we returned to the hall, another bunch of puzzlers had arrived… turn-out was definitely going to be good in spite of it being a new venue. 

I introduced the three new Austrian puzzlers to the rest of the gang and then unpacked my puzzles for everyone to have a go on. I’d just received a couple of new Stickman boxes so I was chuffed to be able to offer folks a bash at the Beast box, Three-lock box and the Autumn box. Over the course of the day I saw several folks having a go on them … and as I write this a week and a half later I still haven’t had a chance to play with all of them! (Write-ups and pics will follow when I have, I promise!) Georg had asked if I’d take along my copy of Wil’s Angel Box so it was there too, but I don’t think he got very far on it… :-(

Astrid picked up my copy of Closed Box fairly early on in the day and managed to get the pieces out quite quickly, but then spent a little longer putting them back in again. We suggested she leave it several times but she was thoroughly determined not to let it beat her and she duly triumphed and then moved on to another puzzle. 

A little later she was having a go at the Danlock with several people egging her on to do what she didn’t want to … at which point she decided that she needed some privacy and took over the piano in the corner as her personal puzzle-space… where she duly beat the Danlock into submission as well. 

Steve (M) had brought along a bunch of new puzzles, including a puzzle box from Kelly Snake called Crypsis… he’d set up a camera to video folks opening it and the reason why quickly became apparent when the first person opened it and let out a little yelp… of course many others fell prey to its ‘charms’ over the day and there are now a number of videos shared on FaceBook of various folks discovering the joys of Kelly’s latest creation… well worth a look, especially if you like seeing surprised puzzlers! 

Bernhard Schweitzer’s first visit to an MPP saw him bearing gifts of a puzzle and a commemorative IPP22 Keyring for everyone attending … AND he was selling some wonderful puzzles as well. He’d given me a copy of the Six Iberian Lynxes (+) earlier that morning and over the course of the next day or two I took a number of other puzzles off his hands (purely to lighten his load on the way home, you understand!) – so I ended up with a Walton Cube, Closed Box, a Pelikan mini-Peanut and a Dovetail Burr as well… and that would have been a pretty decent MPP-haul if Steve (N) hadn’t also had a few things available for purchase… and Dick was offloading some of his things as well… so I ended up with a lot of additional puzzles over the course of the weekend!

Frank Potts went out of his way and brought along a number of wonderful treasures from his extensive collection of Kumiki puzzles. They were displayed separately on a table for all to admire, and play with… some absolute beauties on there!

He’d also brought along a fair collection of puzzles for sale from Potty Puzzles, including a number of rather large Pentangle coffee table puzzles. The hefty Tavern entanglement puzzles seemed to be pretty popular with the other guys as well… 

James Dalgety had brought along several wonderful items for show and tell – I loved his aluminium copy of the three dimensional magic square cubes that Yee-Dian Lee had used as his exchange puzzle in London.

Satomi set up shop for a few hours but had to leave a little early than some of us were banking on, so I’ll have to investigate one or two things via her eBay shop instead of picking them up in person.

Lunchtime saw a major split among the puzzlers with most opting for either fish & chips or a pork bap from the local butchers who do a hog roast in the main street on a Saturday morning. One or two healthy souls opted for a salad or a sandwich but they were definitely in the minority!

Dick did a superb job of manning a registration table and managed to capture email addresses for virtually everyone there and then sent them around to everyone who’d attended afterwards – thanks Dick! 

Adin paid us a flying visit and looked remarkably calm and relaxed in spite of the fact that he was getting married two days later and still had one or two things to take care of... 

I spent quite a while playing with one of Bernhard (W’s) cube puzzles and didn’t get very far at all. I think he had three of them there – all similar sizes and made in plywood. At first all of the sides are stuck firmly in place and the object is to remove the sides… after finding some movement and then managing to use the space created to open up the next panel, I managed to make a little progress, even to the point of finding a useful tool, and actually using it… but then I hit a brick wall and managed to remove a single side only… good fun to play with and had me thoroughly perplexed!

 

At around 6pm I tried to start throwing people out … and about three quarters of an hour later I had succeeded and a few of us headed around the corner for dinner at the local pub before grabbing a couple of hours of chatting and puzzling with Louis back at my place. 

Next morning I collected the B&Bers so they could come round to the puzzle cave and partake in a little more puzzling… with the Austrians duly spending the remainder of their time in Brum quietly puzzling away in the cave … they seemed happy enough! 

I got to spend a couple more hours with Bernhard (S) after I’d dropped off the Austrians for their flights back home via Germany, and after I’d deposited Bernhard at the airport I headed home to solve some puzzles with some US puzzling buddies on the Black Letter Labs next artifact… I gave up on that after nine hours of solid puzzling before calling it a night… 

Now THAT is what I call a puzzling weekend!

Doors and Drawers

Mike Toulouzas makes some incredibly beautiful puzzles in a variety of glorious exotic woods… he tends to make them in reasonably small runs and as a result, they typically aren’t that cheap. Worth every penny in my humblest of opinions, but not cheap. So when Bernhard Schweitzer recently announced that would be stocking a collaboration between Mike and the New Pelikan Workshop, it sounded rather interesting.

I asked Bernhard to reserve a copy for me and duly collected it at the puzzle party at IPP… and a while later I got to play with it.

Let’s start with how it looks: smashing! Mike has taken care of the finer detailing work (think feet and handles) and the Pelikan guys have taken care of the rest – so it looks stunning and the fit is top-notch … and the price is jolly reasonable – Bernhard’s definitely hit on a winner with this particular combination of skills.

Doors and Drawers is one of Mike’s early designs and broadly speaking you might be tempted to describe it as a framed three-piece burr… it might look like one, but if you treat it as one, you’ll take quite a long time to get anywhere on solving it! At first on of the drawers will slide out a bit and slide back in again… fun, but on its own, not all that useful.

Progress comes from realising that this isn’t merely a framed burr, it’s also part packing puzzle… [No that’s not a spoiler - it’s in the puzzle’s description!] This is a packing puzzle where there are some extra little pieces that need to be dealt with before you can make any progress whatsoever… find those pieces, and deal with them (carefully, since the tolerances are really fine and require some rather precise handling) and then you’re free to solve the framed burr part…

…and that’s the part with the high move-count… I managed to dispatch with the packing puzzle bits fairly readily, but found myself struggling over the course of several days with getting the doors and drawers themselves out of the frame. The key, as so often is the case was spotting some subtleties and making sure that they were all being used – time and time again I’d come reasonably close to getting a piece out, but then find myself right back where I started again.

I like the fact that it took me several goes at it over a couple of evenings before I finally managed to remove the next piece – something that made the sense of victory taste a little sweeter for the earning of it.

Reassembly is another serious challenge! Working out the eventual orientation is not a particularly big challenge… working out how to get them there through the 15-or-so moves is the real challenge. I must have got lucky on that bit because it didn’t take me nearly as long as the disassembly did… and slotting the final pieces of the puzzle into place rewards the puzzler with a neat looking little masterpiece.

Vintage design from Mike with his lovely finishing touches and great work from the New Pelikan guys produces a terrific little puzzle – available from Bernhard at a competitive price.

Read Kevin’s thoughts over here… spoiler alert: He likes it too!

A couple more TICs

After my last blog post about Ken Irvine’s great designs, Bernhard Schweitzer let me know that we had a couple of new TICs (Turning Interlocking Cubes – Bernhard’s term) coming available, so I duly put in the obligatory order and a couple of days later a well-protected set of three new TICs arrived - two designed by Ken Irvine and a third by William Hu (he of first-base-fame?). 

Irene Alternate is another of Ken’s 4*4*4 cubes that consists of just 4 pieces … which require “only” 8 moves (by my count) to fully disassemble, but it’s a really tricky little so-and-so. 

Finding the first move is a bit tricky, the second move comes reasonably easily from there, but the third move is a right little sod and I only found it by a series of eliminations and deducing that there was nothing else that could happen, so it had to be that particular move, and it still wasn’t simple. You see, the tolerances on this cube (presumably from the New Pelikan Workshop guys) is fantastic, so there are no clues along the way and the moves only work if things are aligned properly. 

A few more moves separates a couple of sub-assemblies that take a few more moves to fully disassemble… 

Even with only four pieces, reassembling this cube is anything but trivial – you can work out how the pieces need to sit in their eventual solved shape, but getting them there will need some creative thinking. 

Keyhole is rather aptly named as once you’ve found the key, you’ll find yourself having to manipulate it to unlock the structure around it and then progressing dismantle the rest of the puzzle until you’re left with 4 rather oddly shaped pieces, and your key. :-)

Five moves to remove the first piece, and then they come apart pretty regularly from there onwards. 

The first few moves are bit tricky, but once you’ve removed the first piece, it’s pretty much downhill from there … and once again, as you’d expect from Ken’s designs, getting them back together is a grand little challenge – especially since my favourite piece of puzzling software can’t help much along the way. 

Two-Wheeled Cube is my first design from the Australian designer, William Hu. This one is particularly fiendish – it lulls you into a false sense of security because things seem reasonably straight-forward to start with – four pieces come out just like that, leaving you with a pair of interlocked wheels. 

Getting those apart requires a good few rotations and you’re all done…

…and unless you paid very close attention to the orientation of those two wheels, you’re in for one heck of a challenge – getting them back into the right orientation so they’ll receive the remaining pieces is a pretty stiff challenge… trust me!

Three great TICs – thanks Bernhard!