CORVI 2020

I often find myself calling my mate Chinny a bit of a nutter – in a good way of course. He’s one of those guys whose laughter will instantly brighten up a room-full of puzzlers deep in concentration and the boy has skillz – man does he have skillz! And when those skillz, and that sense of humour combine, quite often something magical appears.

Chinny is also the sort of guy that, when life gives him lemons, he makes lemonade – damn good lemonade! So when 2020 threw COVID-19 at us, Chinny saw that as puzzle fodder, and cooked up a puzzle that might just pass as a slightly scaled-up model of the COVID-19 virus – and presented us with CORVI 2020… his entry in this year’s Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.

A few copies of this puzzle have appeared on various puzzle auctions over the last month or two and I managed to snaffle a copy (along with some more Chinny awesome-ness – but that’s another blog post well off into the future!) and after a slightly longer than usual wander over to Blighty, I finally got a shot of the Chin-meister’s sense of humour.

Of course it also comes with a handsome stand, complete with a trapped ring around the base with virtually no play between the dished sides and the perfectly round, well-trapped ring – because Chinny hates to waste any of the wood that gets cut off when he’s turning a project… and speaking of wood – my virus is made of some rather nicely marbled Mulberry wood – this is definitely my first puzzle made out of Mulberry!

The puzzle itself is a generously-sized sphere, perfectly pitted about the entire surface, with about 30 golf tees giving it the characteristic spiky COVID-19 look. Looking carefully at the sphere you’ll spot a dividing line and you might surmise that you’re going to need to open this virus up at some point.

Examining the tees a little you’ll discover that most of them just pull out… and some don’t … and several have perfectly functioning whistles cut into them (it’s a Chinny thing: there’s usually a whistle somewhere in his playful designs!). Some of the tees are special and require a bit more thought and you might even need to engage actual puzzle-solving mode at this point.

To be honest, removing the golf tees isn’t even the appetiser in this fully-balanced meal! You will need to find out what’s stopping you from opening this virus up, and be warned, there are several steps in that process… but if you persist you are rewarded by the rather ominous ticking countdown and the sound of an explosion as you catch sight of death himself staring right back at you goading you into doing something you shouldn’t.

This is classic Chinny: it may not levitate (for long) or indeed make breakfast, but it provides you with several whistles and a darn good laugh when you open the thing up.

Closing it all up again is reasonably straight forward once you've seen the insides, but then there is the small matter of reinserting all of the golf tees so that the colours are symmetric and no colour is repeated in any of the pentagons on the surface of the virus.

Definitely a worthy new puzzle in the canon-of-the-Chin-meister – guaranteed to put a smile on your face! 

Thanks for giving us a reason to laugh at that blimming virus, Chinny!

Ze Orange

[This post contain some spoilers – so if you think you’re likely to come across one of these in the near future (consider yourself damn lucky! But), don’t read this blog post… you’ve been warned – don’t complain!]

What’s the appropriate reaction when a dodgy-looking Aussie invites you up to his hotel room to look at some puzzles?

Simple – make sure you have your wallet and don’t lose him on the way… 

…and that’s how I became the rather chuffed owner of a copy of Ze Orange by Lathe-Master-Chinny. (Sounds a bit like an 80’s rap artist!)

It’s about the right size and shape for a decent-sized orange and genuinely looks the part – with an orangey pitted skin and a silvery stalk on top. The lathe work on the outside of this thing is deeply impressive – the chattering is perfectly executed and beautifully matched, and how the heck he’s got the grain to line up across what I’m pretty sure are separate two parts, I’ll never know!

There’s an interesting feature on the bottom – where there’s a panel with a slot across it…but no apparent way to open that, yet…

The description on the Design Competition web site says that Ze Orange was inspired by the Donay Pear produced by Goddard & Berkeley … and if you’re familiar with their stuff, you’ll be expecting lots of screw threads, pretty serious turning and probably a coin somewhere along the way to use in that slot…

Right, so let’s get started – first off, surely that silver stalk comes off? Indeedy! Unscrew it and off it comes… then what?

Here some careful inspection will nudge you in the right direction, but there are a couple of things that are out to stop you progressing – one’s a classic and the other is classic Chinny. I’ll leave you to decide which is which…

Open Ze Orange and you find you have two halves, each with something interesting inside it… one half has another of those slots (but still no coin!) and the other has what looks like a little round pill box, wooden of course, with a pimple on top of it.

Decide which of these two you’d like to tackle first – actually, there’s only really one choice and have at it… playing detective will show you something interesting and perhaps a use for a tool you have already discovered – use that and you’ll find the little pill box being released from its half of Ze Orange…

Well done! You’ve discovered a little puzzle box… which you now need to open in order to find another rather useful little thingy, although depending on who put it back together for you, that might not be a trivial task.

You should recognise your new find as a useful tool and use it in the obvious place – which yields more intrigue than it does enlightenment, frankly… but there you go. Perhaps there's something else to be done?

Indeed there is and that leads you to what looks like another little puzzle box – except the very thing you want to do to open it up seems to be absolutely flipping impossible – so you need to Think©!

Find how to open the last little box and you’re greeted by some wonderfully irritating electronic muzak … the other of Chinny’s great trademarks!

It’s a wonderfully fun puzzle – a serious sequential discovery puzzle shaped like a fruit – some serious lathe skills on show – six locking mechanisms - two built-in puzzle boxes – and funky muzak to boot! It has to be from Chinnomotto.

One of my awesome finds in Ottawa this year…

[Yes, I didn't really tell you everything, there's some other clever little things in there that will hopefully trip you up even though you've read all this! Some of them won't even be clear from the next pic either, he's a crafty guy is Chinny!]

...the innards plus a few random objects...

A quick plug...

[UPDATE - and we're all done at $13,201 ... ]   

[Pic courtesy of the Stickman.]

...for an awesome project from some of my puzzle-buddies. 

Just in case you haven't already seen this, and you're a fan of puzzle boxes - this is without a doubt the single-most-epic-puzzle-box-you-will-ever-find.Bar none. 

As I write this the bidding has gone past $10,000 ... and it's still a bargain, albeit one my bank manager won't allow me to enjoy! If you don't have an account set up yet, Nick will be glad to oblige  ... Oh and by the way there are some other little things on sale too... [at puzzles.baxterweb.com]

The Stickman Apothecary Puzzlechest is a realized vision, over 4 years in the making, with the goal of representing an entire era of some of the best puzzle designers and craftsmen from around the world.  Twelve prolific artists from 5 different countries participated in orchestrating its creation.  Each drawer within has been quality hand-crafted to exhibit the best abilities and individual styles of these artists.  

The chest itself is also a complex mechanical puzzle.  The solution of individual puzzlebox drawers is required to obtain mechanical parts, and these are required to progress its sequential movement.  Within the chest, mechanical pistons lock drawers into place while still allowing them to slide freely.  Pushing in on a drawer causes others to automatically extrude from the chest.  And in turn, pushing those drawers back causes yet other drawers to come out in an apparently random fashion.  Deducing the pattern and sequence of drawer movements is part of the puzzle to this chest, as drawers can only be released under certain conditions.  Once a puzzle drawer has been removed and solved, pressing it back into its slot will automatically re-engage it into its locking mechanical piston.  

Enough cannot be said about the puzzle drawers designed by contributing artists; many of whom have received awards for their abilities.  The only restriction placed upon designs was the size of the puzzle, which required parameter sides of 3” just to fit into the chest, (some puzzles are 3” cube and others measure 3” x 3” x 4”).  The goal was as to require minimal restrictions in order to ensure the true flavor and style of each artist.

[Pic courtesy of the Stickman.]

The designs of puzzlebox drawers vary from the seemingly simple to exhaustingly complex.  Some require just a few profound and elusive steps, while others require moves going into the hundreds.  Many of these puzzles are exclusive to only this chest, or significantly limited in production, and are therefore rare.  With such diversity in complexity, concepts, and styles, there is something appealing to everyone in this chest. The chest is crafted from quality sapele wood, decoratively accented with purpleheart inlays, and measures 18” x 16” x 12”.  It rests up on a base of intricately carved wooden feet and comes with a 15-page, fully illustrated instruction book.  All drawers have been signed and numbered by each artist. 

Originally, the only way to obtain one of these chests was to be an artist contributing to the project, and none were intended for public sale.  However project bylaws have since been expanded, now allowing for two additional copies to be sold at auction to help cover expenses.  Stickman Apothecary Puzzle Chests are limited in edition to only 15 completed copies, and this particular chest is #15 out of the limited edition set.

...and Rox has an even better write-up over here - with more pictures!!!

Pennyhedrons galore

Ages ago I found myself chasing my own tail on an auction of Chinny’s set of Pennyhedrons – I’d been the only one bidding on a particular set and in spite of outbidding myself several times, I was still coming up short against the invisible reserve price and in the end I lost out to said invisible foe.

[As an aside, I love Chinny’s auction listings – where else will you find the Designer listed and “Stewart Coffin & Me” and the material simply as “wood”. Oh, and when he describes the fit as “Tight”, he means it!] 

I’d managed to snag something else by Chinny on the same auction so asked him how far away from the reserve price I’d been, and when he told me, I offered to buy it from him at that price and sent him the Paypal straight away (turns out I’d been reasonably close). 

A few weeks later I picked up a bunch of things from him in Narita… including this lovely set of Pennyhedrons, which were instantly shared around in the lobby of the IPP hotel and they kept several people amused for ages … actually they kept me amused for considerably longer! 

Pennyhedrons were first described by Stewart Coffin in his book “The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections” as simple puzzles created by his children out of workshop scraps – the first variant needed an unusual grip to separate the two parts and had a hole in the centre that held a penny. They were sold at craft fairs as “Pennyhedrons” … not long after that the fertile mind noticed that he could produce very structure that looked identical on the outside, but required very different grips or movements to release them… and a family of Pennyhedrons was born. 

Chinny has produced an interesting variation or two of his own and in the course of his research had documented all of the known variations on the theme … but being an ace craftsman, there’s very little point in just documenting them, so he produced a couple of sets of all the variants that he could find and put some of them up for auction … and I suspect that one of the sets ended up going to Master Coffin as a gift from the nutty dentist. 

…and thus it came to pass that I collected a lovely set of hardwood rhombic dodecahedra from my Australian friend… complete with a list of the puzzles in the set on a page from his prescription pad. (Take two until the pain subsides and call me in the morning!)

The set starts out with the standard Coffin 3+3 grip Pennyhedron from the book, although Chinny’s done a superb job of disguising it by the way he’s combined the woods he’s used. There’s the trick version of the standard Pennyhedron that Coffin describes quite well as being quite simple, unless you’re expecting a Pennyhedron, in which case it might confuse you for a bit…

From there the set descends into some serious puzzling … including a few uneven grip designs from Coffin (2/4 and 3/4 fingered grips!) and ends up with Chinny’s own Rose Pennyhedron that comes apart in a rather unusual manner that actually looks like the petals of a rose opening …

One of them – a three-piece monster in the darker wood at the back right of the group photo has kept me out for several months. Chinny’s fit and finish is so good that when these guys are together, most of the time you cannot see where the joins are going to be coming from or which way to pull, or indeed push the various facets… and how the heck he gets them to snap together at the end, I have no idea! Anyhow, back to this dark and evil monster – I’d been trying to work it out for ages and had it up in front of my PC monitor so that I could try a new theory every now and then – usually with not luck whatsoever – until recently when I managed to get it to just about start opening – I changed grip a bit and instead of opening, it snapped firmly shut, biting me in the process… even knowing what I knew, it still took me a few more day to get it open … and working out how to close it properly took another few days – it is mean, and it bites too!

I’m not the best at remembering solutions to the puzzles I play with and this set has provided a lot of re-solving fun as I often find myself back at the starting gate as it were when I’m trying to open them…

It wouldn’t be Chinny if something didn’t explode, so there’s a spin-it-until-it-explodes-apart-into-a-bunch-pieces Pennyhedron as well. However – the piece de resistance is the undercover Pennyhedron, looks like all the others, however it IS glued together … sometimes I forget to mention that when I hand them out for puzzlers to play with…

Thanks Chinny – it’s a great set of the classics! Chinny & Coffin rule…