Axes and Hammer

Let me start by making one thing absolutely clear: I am rubbish at disentanglements!

Yet, for some reason, I decided that I rather liked the looks of Axes and Hammer when it was entered in the 2020 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition. Some time later I reached out to the designer and managed to acquire a copy… albeit the wonders of the pandemic and its impact on the international postal system meant that I had to be a little mor patient than usual while it wended its way from China to little old Barnt Green – but wend, it did, and I was delighted with the quality of this little guy.

The axes have a nice shape and profile and the hammer is pleasingly solid – marry that with the not insubstantial chain, and you have a puzzle that is not going to allow you to do anything that you absolutely shouldn’t be able to…

At first glance, Axes and Hammer looks like a standard disentanglement – do something where you wouldn’t normally expect to do it, and Hey Presto, the ring’s free! Although knowing that it’s been accepted into the design competition lets you know immediately that it’s not going to be nearly that simple!

And it isn’t… in fact it’s rather tricky – and relies on the puzzler noticing a few little details made possible by some neatly designed features and pretty good tolerances… in fact, there’s one part of the solution that is very fussy indeed – if you don’t approach things absolutely perfectly, you’ll be convinced it’s not going to work… and duly shift your attention elsewhere.

This one’s definitely a puzzlers’ puzzle, in my humble opinion… one for someone who thinks they know what to do and is open to a little lesson in humility from a talented designer… this one doesn’t suffer fools and demands you pay attention to the details, or you end up going round and round in circles. (Yup, got that t-shirt!)  

 

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!

Puzzling in Wales-shire

This week’s blog post was delayed a little by a family trip to Wales-shire… Oz was over visiting from Cape Town so Gill found us a stunning self-catering barn 5 minutes’ walk from the beach… sounds awful doesn’t it? Hopefully the picture will confirm just how much I was taking-for-the-team… I did get to take some puzzles along, and there was a goodly amount of time spent puzzling… some of which will deserve their own write-up so they’ll hardly get a mention here.

…along those lines, the day before we left, my latest package arrived from Wil, complete with a copy of the Butterfly Lock Box (aka Pleasure and Pain) and Ying Yang 69 puzzles – those will definitely need to feature on their own at some point… for now I will only say that they’re both great puzzles – and my inherent distrust of the puzzle-meister saved me a fair amount of pain! ;-)

Aside from the latest arrivals, I wanted to take puzzles that would keep me puzzling for a good while, so there were a few multi-challenge puzzles from Thinkfun for me to work through, some Minoru Abe sliding tile puzzles and several entanglements from Dick Hess – most of which had proved my undoing in the past… I was going to refer to them as my nemesii, but realised there’s probably a good reason that there’s no plural for nemesis. A couple of Osanori Yamamoto puzzles rounded out the puzzles that were successfully solved while I was away…

…and the quick-witted among you will realise there is at least one obvious omission – that’s ‘cos it wasn’t solved while I was away… hopefully you’ll also notice that I took my special £2 coin along for the obligatory photograph! 

The lengths I go to…

Two Thinkfun multi-challenge puzzles helped keep me puzzling for several hours on the Gower:

Turnstile provides 40 graded challenges (the earlier ones just really get you used to the mechanics of the game) where you’re given a start positions with gates and pieces set up in a particular fashion. Your challenge is to move the coloured counters to their home corners while negotiating the turnstiles and the other pieces (the grey pieces are basically just movable road blocks).  Good fun to take out and work through a few challenges at a time before switching across to another puzzle… the latter challenges will definitely give you something to think about, but remain accessible. 

Tilt provides a great real-world implementation of gravity mazes that seem to pop up in puzzle apps quite regularly. The challenge cards show you where to place blocking pieces and green and blue counters. Your job is to tilt the board successively in different directions so that the green counters fall through the hole in the centre and the blues all remain on the board… and the only rule you need to worry about is that you must let all pieces slide and come to a rest against something (i.e. no sneaky half-moves – that’s cheating!). Having played one or two of these apps definitely helps a bit, but the later challenges have a number of traps for the unwary (yes, I was very unwary!) – but resetting and starting over only takes a few seconds and you’re ready to go with a clean board. Nice real world application of this sort of puzzle – with the mechanics working pretty much all the time, but if anything does get caught, a tap or two will send them on their way. 

A couple of weeks ago I’d picked up three Osanori Yamamoto burrs from Satomi at CU-Japan. These weren’t particularly expensive as they’re made from thin laser-cut MDF. While nothing beats a lovely exotic wooden version, until someone takes up the challenge of making them, these represent a great cost-effective way of getting the designs out into the market. 

Rose presents you with four interlocking pieces trapped in a central circular frame. Your first job is the find what movements are possible, and with a new puzzle, the pieces need to be well-aligned or you won’t find anything moving. Find some movement and if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself going round and round in circles… you need to be a little more subtle than I generally am to find the next set of moves – and given the designer, you’ll be tempted to start exploring all manner of rotational moves as well… good luck with that! 

Rose 2 is a development of Rose, with a more complicated frame and some differences in the pieces… you probably want to play with Rose before going on to Rose 2 if you want to maximise your enjoyment on these two… another lovely little design that will amuse the most-hardened puzzlist. (Oh and it take 26 moves to release the first piece!)  

# Shield gives you a frame with four pieces that need to make up a “#” sign inside the frame, only this time there’s a ledge along the bottom that will block quite a few rather useful moves… which makes it a rather nice challenge. 

A pair of sliding tile puzzles from Minoru Abe kept me quiet for quite a while. Angel and Satan has two simple little creatures, each made up of three pieces that need to be transposed – that’s all! There’s a huge gap in the centre between the two figures and only a tiny little interfering piece in the centre. Yet it’s thoroughly non-trivial! I’d had several bashes at it before my holiday and got nowhere, so I was delighted when I finally managed to work out how to make use of every little feature in the design to get those two creatures to swap places… I think the optimal solution requires 74 moves… I took somewhat more!

Runaway II provides a 5 different challenges with varying themes on moving a set of digits from 1 to 4 from the top to the bottom (or vice versa) via two different sized cut-outs between the two rows… Oh, and there are a pair of stars and a heart to get in the way and force you to think a few moves ahead… which I’m rubbish at! 

Finally, in preparation for an upcoming visit form the entangle-meister himself, I took a few sets of Dick Hess’ entanglements along … mainly because I’m thoroughly rubbish at them and haven’t been able to solve any of them yet and I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having to admit I couldn’t solve any of his puzzles at all…

First off the Mini-Menagerie Puzzles – Dick’s IPP26 exchange puzzle. This set consists of the Ox, Rhino and Whale and to the neophyte, they all look like they’re more or less the same puzzle… yet I hadn’t managed to solve them yet despite the odd attempt at doing exactly that! 

To the untrained eye, the Whale looks to be the simplest… so I started there, and promptly got nowhere – it doesn’t have a lot of the complications that the other animals have, yet I just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted… so I switched to one of the land-based animals and had a little more luck, after quite a while I found I could get the Ox’s bits to do something interesting that I hadn’t expected, and pretty soon I had removed its tail (or rider, of you prefer). 

Flushed with a sense of victory I switched attention to the Rhino and tried something similar – only to find that simply wouldn’t work… so I spent a long time experimenting before I finally found something (else) totally unexpected …and had its tail off too. The Whale finally succumbed too, but only after I’d generated a HUGE amount of respect for my friend Dick – he’s made those puzzles all look thoroughly similar, but are they? Heck! That was a lot of fun, and I’m now looking forward to trying my inexperienced hand at some more of his puzzles – if they give me half as much of an A-Ha! moment I’m going to be very chuffed!

The final two puzzles in the pics are a pair of Dick’s Sisters – from his IPP29 exchange puzzle Three Sisters – spot the missing one yet? Sadly I only managed to take two of the sisters apart – the Tall Sister still eludes me… 

These puzzles again look totally similar yet the subtle differences in the shapes or the design of the rings makes their solutions totally different – Blonde and Dancing Sister yielded after a good session of experimenting where the solution always looks like it’s not too far off – you’re pretty sure you know where you’re trying to get things, they just won’t quite go where you want them… a couple of little bits of wire kept me wonderfully amused for hours… thanks Dick!