IPP - part, the first.

Well IPP probably doesn’t officially start until Thursday, but we’re all in the hotel and ready to go on Wednesday, so this is when IPP really starts for me…

Gill leads the IPP Fabulous Fun Fabric & Fibre tour that leaves from the hotel bright and early on the Wednesday morning. Their coach takes them on a tour of three fabulous & fun yarn, fabric and haberdashery stores around London with a stop around lunchtime for the hungry shoppers to replenish their energy levels. Gill counts the trip as a huge success, not only has she found some interesting new stuff for future crafting projects, she also manages not to lose any of the folks she started the day with – Result!

The boys in our bunch all congregate in the lobby before we head off into London for the room escape we have booked for around noon. We realise that things aren’t going that smoothly when we start getting messages from Nick that he’s been a bit delayed … in fact he’s sitting on a plane at Heathrow when we get the first message. Subsequent messages tell the story of him getting off the plane first, making it past 200 folks in the queue for Customs and then managing to grab a cab for the hotel. When he walks through the entrance we erupt in cheers and after handing his case to the concierge, and changing his shirt he heads off into town with us in search of a room to escape from. 

At about the same time we get emails from Brian and Kellian, who’re coming into London by train from Paris, saying that they missed their train, and then got delayed… in spite of all of that adversity, we all meet up at HintHunt HQ in time for the briefing to begin. We've booked two different rooms for teams of 5 each and before we start the escapes there’s a bit of inevitable trash-talking and competitiveness between the two teams who fundamentally can’t compete. 

We all end up having a brilliant game, with the experienced guys (some of whom have done several room escapes in the US, Canada and even Beijing!) having just as much fun as the neophytes (me!). We had great fun literally trashing the rooms in search of clues and answers to the riddles we found. Solving puzzles along the way and even having to open a few puzzle boxes. 

Both teams ended up escaping from their respective rooms – although we ended up finishing with a mere 55 seconds on the one hour countdown clock… brilliant fun and well worth a visit if you’re in London. 

From there we took the tube up to Camden for some lunch at Lock 17 before heading down to Village Games where we bumped into Otis. Village Games manages to cram an incredible variety of puzzles and games into a really tiny little shop. 

From there we wandered across to the market itself as some of the guys had found some interesting looking Japanese puzzle boxes with a Union Jack on the front. Jim and Jeff each bought a copy and we didn’t manage to convince the lovely young lady in the shop to bring some through to the hotel for us (pity, she could probably have sold a heap of them in the lobby!) – I did manage to get one from their web-shop after IPP though… :-)

After a round of ice-cream cones, some of us headed back to LHR on the tube and then went through registration while I sorted out my duties for the next afternoon. 

Dinner was back at the Three Magpies again and this time we had a waiter who spotted the puzzles on the table and got really interested and seemed amazed when we told him there’d be three or four hundred of the world’s most serious collectors in the hotel across the road. 

Back in the hotel lobby the girls, under Lesley Wiltshire's creative direction, ran an impromptu needle-felting workshop and soon had the Bexfield girls merrily creating a mallard and a dinosaur – they seemed to enjoy it and next day they arrived with a bagful of felting supplies sourced en route to the hotel via a quick visit to Hobbycraft. Methinks the SOAPs are winning friends and teaching new crafts… 

At one point Jeff hauled out Jack (it’s a card game!) and proceeded to teach Brian and Louis the rules and then stepped back and watched them play… I watched from a distance, listening to the verbalised logic and realising that I really wasn’t paying enough attention to keep up. I sat fiddling with a copy of Cast Galaxy that a friend had thrust into my hands earlier that evening – I got nowhere on that either!

Highlight of the evening must have been finally meeting Mike Toulouzas and his lovely wife Margaret for the first time. I’ve been emailing Mike for a couple of years and we’ve chatted about what makes a good puzzle so much that I felt like I’d known him for ages, but it was great to finally meet him in the flesh… and even better to see how well Margaret and the rest of the girls got on as soon as they were introduced – Margaret loves sewing and crafts as much as the rest of them… ‘nuff said. 

The Greenhorn Hat began doing the rounds with Rox… it’s a ridiculously garish blue bowler hat, decorated with union jack ribbons and a pair of large green horns sticking out of it. (I can say it’s garish because Gill made it and it was intended to be as garish as possible!) 

The intention was that the hat would go around to every IPP-rookie (greenhorn!) twice and that every time they had it, they would need to talk to a non-greenhorn they didn’t know in order to pass it on… the veteran then passes it on to a rookie they don’t know yet, after they’ve introduced themselves and had a chat to them… cute idea to get everyone talking and give the new folks an excuse to chat to the big guns! Or that was the theory, but at the start it didn’t seem that Rox was very keen to pass the hat on. When we asked her why she said there weren’t any greenhorns around, which was quite amusing as there were a couple of them within spitting distance, and when we pointed that out, the hat began to shift rather rapidly.

On Thursday morning we met up in the lobby and headed into town for some sight-seeing. We hopped off the tube at Green Park and wandered through the park to Buck-house where the tourists spent a while taking pics of the palace and the Guardsmen leaving on horseback. There were huge crowds waiting for the changing of the guards so we headed down through St James Park and on to Whitehall where we hung around to see the fresh set of guards heading off back up to Buck-house. We followed Whitehall along to Westminster for some views of the Abbey and the Palace of Westminster before heading across the bridge to the London Eye. 

The guys had booked themselves on the Eye, so Gill and I wandered along the river for a spot of lunch while they enjoyed the views from a few hundred feet up before Gill went back to meet the others and I headed back to the hotel to help out on registration and photographing duties. I had a lot of fun at registration joking with my puzzling friends and making sure they were having a laugh while we took care of the business of getting them formally signed up. 

A quick trip back up to the room to get changed and find Gill (successfully back from London with all the tourists in tow!) before joining the several hundred-strong queue for the Founders’ Reception with the usual suspects.  We grabbed a table near the front when we were allowed in and hooked ourselves up with some food and drink before the speeches kicked off – Jerry gave the traditional welcome and made sure that the rookies felt specially welcomed and encouraged to chat to all of the veteran-IPPers. Laurie followed Jerry’s speech with a welcome from the host and the Greenhorn Bowler Hat began doing the rounds rather rapidly after that. 

I had a fun chat with Saul Bobroff who took Gill’s chair when she got up to go and have a chat with someone – she kissed me as she went off and Saul said “She’s a keeper” at which point I looked in the direction that Gill was leaving in and then looked at Saul and with a deadpan look said “Who the heck was that?”. Soon after that Laurie swiped my chair as I’d finished eating so I wandered around and found myself having a chat with Robert Sandfield and Perry McDaniel, discussing, of all things, finishing off puzzles using grocery bags…!

The Design Competition room was opened a little while later and it was immediately flooded with folks eager to get their paws on the latest and the greatest from the best designers and craftsmen in the world. Brian began his marathon attempt at solving every single puzzle in the Design Competition and I made a couple of lame attempts at solving some puzzles… I did manage to open Chinny’s stellated Pennyhedrons and I was quite chuffed with that. 

 

At one of the puzzle tables I ended up having a long chat with Tomas and Mikko about producing the Souvenir Book – I get some more ideas about just how big a job this is going to be… before I spend a while watching some folks trying to solve Peter’s Golden Ratio box. 

As usual there’s plenty of banter and abuse around the puzzling tables – I spend an absolute age trying to build a 5*5*5 cube out of a few simple pieces and fail miserably… one thing I do spot is a puzzle called Cross Links that looks a lot like Mike Toulouzas’ work and I make a mental note to ask him about it…

Friday is Exchange Day – or to give it its full name, the Edward Hordern Puzzle Exchange, in honour of the wonderful gent who first started the idea of exchanging puzzles when IPP was last held in London many moons ago. 

 

Louis rocks up at my room bright and early and a short while later we join the queue of folks waiting patiently outside the conference room with our two large cases full of books. Everyone’s chatting animatedly and the excitement is clearly building. 

We’re released into the room and soon 99 puzzlers are setting out their stands laden with 100 of their puzzles… one copy goes on the display table and then we’re more or less ready to begin the games. My table looks like a second hand book stall and today I’m giving away books…

Marti eyes out a book and sidles over before Laurie’s even done his opening remarks – Laurie explains the ground rules and then we’re off … 98 puzzle exchanges follow – you’re explaining your puzzles to others while listening to their schpiel, you exchange puzzles and take the obligatory pictures for posterity and move on to the next table, or wait for the next customer to rock up at your table… some of the puzzles look absolutely fabulous and I know I’m going to enjoy playing with them when I finally get a chance.

Louis and I stop for lunch along the way, pretty tired already – it’s pretty exhausting explaining your puzzle’s aim and the ground rules 90-odd times and I realise that there is no way in heck I’m going to remember the aims of all of these puzzles come the end of the session…

We finish with about half an hour to spare and Louis has done a stunning job of photographing every single exchanger with their puzzle, kept me in puzzles to exchange with others and lugged all my swag around for almost 6 hours… but I think he’s enjoyed himself, and managed to spot some interesting puzzles to look out for at the puzzle party the next day. 

I dump a shed-load of swag in the room before heading straight out again for the afternoon lectures. 

There are some great lectures in the afternoon and I particularly enjoy Simon and Steve’s presentation on Threedy printing, Peter’s talk on secret opening boxes and Angus Lavery’s talk on impossible card folding… and I learn a lot from Markus’ talk on solving disentanglement puzzles – which I’m  unusually rubbish at!

After the lectures I literally have five minutes to get changed, find Gill (who’s only just got back from a shopping trip with the girls) and get downstairs again for the banquet. There are a few tables of Renegades and MPP-folk and it’s terrific to see so many MPP shirts among the masses at the banquet. 

There aren't many speeches, but there are a couple of presentations that are quite special. Gary Foshee has been making the customary Host Gifts for many years now and he'd decided after he'd made this year's gift for Laurie he'd be retiring from that role... so the organisers had a special gift made for him - Brian Young presented him with a special version of The Opening Bat, made with leftovers and reject bits and pieces if Brian's speech was anything to go by - I suspect that he's added a fair number of new twists and "improvements" to Gary's version of the puzzle... 

And with that out of the way, Gary was allowed to present a beautiful Corian Big Ben puzzle to Laurie as a thank you for hosting this year's IPP in London...

The entertainment for the evening is headed by Colin Wright, a rather talented juggler. He pitched the performance just right when he noted that a huge number of folks in the audience juggle too. His routine was based around defining notation for juggling tricks and having described the basics, he then went on to demonstrate by getting the audience to make up a new juggling trick that he proceeded to perform(!). 

After the entertainment was over, we resorted to creating our own and Chris ended up giving the table a master class on solving and disassembling Ramisis puzzles… I faded pretty soon after that and ended up totally missing what I suspect were some world class close-up magic displays at the various tables.

Some random bits and bobs

The last time I visited James Dalgety, he was having a bit of a clear-out and had put aside a bunch of puzzles in some plastic crates for swap or sale, including a special crate of interesting items to be offered on a future puzzle auction – those were well beyond my financial reach on the day! (I hadn’t ever seen a new-in-box Panex Gold Puzzle before … didn’t think they still existed …)

After I’d done a sweep of the duplicate books shelf and picked up some interesting titles and half of a set of Cubism For Fun magazines*, I turned my attention to the swaps boxes and picked through a veritable treasure trove. I seemed to keep stumbling across things I recognised as being rather special, from my puzzle-reading and it would have been very easy to spend a whole lot more.

I picked up three rather interesting little puzzles that afternoon.

Peppermint Twist was John Ergatoudis’ IPP17 Exchange Puzzle. Reminiscent of a twisted sugar cane, this is a sweet little puzzle. (Sorry, I’ll behave.) It consists of four twisted steel strands that fit together to make a stable, neat structure … as long as the pieces are in the right place.

Starting from the solved position, it soon becomes totally clear that the only way to get these pieces apart is to slide one of them out the end by twisting it out of the bundle, and once the first one is out, sliding the next one out is easier, and soon enough you’ll have four twisted bits of metal that all look rather similar.

Reassembly isn’t totally straight-forward as there are a number of ways of putting three strands together that look pretty good only to find that the last one won’t engage… and there are some almost-solutions that leave the last piece so tight that you may well damage something in the process of trying to slot it back in … but when you find just the right combination, the last piece slides in ever-so-gently, just like it was meant to.

A fun puzzle to fiddle absent-mindedly with…

I first spotted a copy of the Perplexity puzzle on Rob Stegmann’s mammoth web-site and thought it looked neat, so when I found a copy in the swaps-bin I put it on one side.

According to Edward Hordern’s Sliding Piece Puzzles book (acquired from James on an earlier visit) these puzzles were the subject of a 1900 patent and have been produced in several forms over the years.  Rob’s collection includes several variations on the theme in his section on Sliding Block Puzzles.

The one I got is a pretty tidy example of the main variant that was first produced in 1919 – I’m not sure exactly when this copy dates back to – but it’s almost certainly just become the oldest puzzle in my little collection, by a very long way!

The letters slide up and down the main track, with a couple of branch lines permitting a bit of storage and shuffling space and the aim of the puzzle is to spell out PERPLEXITY along the main track – first backwards, then forwards. 

My first thoughts were that it wasn’t tremendously difficult as a puzzle because there’s a fair amount of space on the sidelines and there are a couple of pairs of letters that are interchangeable – however I’d totally missed a couple of subtleties about the buttons and totally failed to understand why sometimes there seemed to be a lot more space to work with than other times ... and I only discovered those after reading Edward Hordern’s notes on this little puzzle...

It’s a cute little historical artefact that’s survived many years so far – I’ll try and keep it going for a bit longer… 

[Jerry wrote about his copy over here if you're interested in some more thoughts...] 

My third interesting little find in the swap-boxes was a copy of Allan Boardman’s IPP13 exchange puzzle – a Circular Tangram. At about two inches across it’s a dinky little puzzle, as you might expect from the chap whose burrs are usually measured in single-digit millimetres across. It’s a maple tray with a set of tangram pieces resting in it –and when I first had a look at the pieces I assumed they were some sort of thin acrylic sheet – they’re only about 1.64 mm thick and are black as night. 

I was somewhat embarrassed when a bit more research on t’internet informed me that the pieces were in fact finely cut ebony – wow – of course I then added to the embarrassment by admitting this to one or two more experienced puzzlers who had a good laugh at the fact that I could have thought mister Boardman would have used acrylic – I mean, really! <Blush>

* … and since then I’ve been in touch with Rik van Grol at the Nederlandse Kubus Club and managed to purchase copies of all of the other Cubism For Fun back issues that I was missing, so I now also have a complete set of (the English editions of) those magazines as well – plenty reading lies ahead.

Midlands Puzzlers Descend on Devon (again)

When some Midlands Puzzle Party participants couldn’t make the last trip down to the Puzzle Museum, James Dalgety kindly offered to host another bunch in the New Year – and so it came to pass that another bunch of puzzlers headed south this past weekend.

Adin (mental note: as in the mathematical operator, not the country!) brought his fiancée Sophie and Jez brought his son Charlie, Richard Gain joined us from way up north and Kevin took the train down as far as Taunton and I picked him up from there on my drive down from Brum. This time we heeded James’ warnings about low-slung racing cars (Nigel’s Three-series took a bit of a hammering on James’ drive) and not relying on a sat-nav for the bit from Taunton – so I picked Kevin up in the Golf [Ed: which in my world is a completely normal car!] and he navigated from Taunton – he did a great job of navigating us there – unfortunately I did a less good job of getting him back to the station that evening and ended up doing some rather interesting manoeuvres en route – but in my defence, I got him there on time!

When Kevin and I arrived we found most of the others there already and Lindsey was soon plying us with coffee to go with Gill’s choc-chip cookies – they seemed to go down well! (Thanks hon!) [Ed: You're welcome!]

We spent a little while unpacking our humble contributions for James’ amusement (a couple of Stickmen, some Makishi’s and some twisties, along with a box-full of Richard’s micro-cubes) before the first half of the tour began. Even though I’d had the tour last time, I was keen to loiter around within earshot because I love hearing the stories behind the puzzles and what makes them important or unique or interesting to James. When the tour reached the first of the main glass cabinets, there was a noticeable intake of collective breaths when everyone realised that the cupboards underneath the glass cabinets were jammed with drawers that were in turn jammed with antique Japanese puzzle boxes … and it all went downhill from there!

Charlie working on the Scannavini cabinet

We managed to just about get around the first room before Lindsey announced that lunch was served, so we stopped and feasted on a tremendous spread for a while. There was a lovely laugh from Lindsey when one of the guys asked her if this was really the family dining room – we’d just about managed to clear enough space on the table to fit our plates and drinks among the piles of puzzles and James had adopted his usual perch on his rather nifty fold-up staircase. I suspect that Lindsey’s response was shorthand for “In theory, yes, however….”.

After lunch a parcel arrived for James from a certain German twisty puzzle supplier and it didn’t take long for him to open it and Kevin to recognise the puzzles and make approving noises while James began idly fiddling with his new Gear Pyraminx and Wellness Cube – sixty thousand-odd puzzles in his collection and he’s still genuinely interested in the latest two twisty puzzles that Uwe Meffert has produced – that was really great to see. He’s still enthusiastic about seeing new puzzles and playing with them – and he’s been doing it for forty years – tremendous! When I grow up, I want to be like that too…

After that little interlude we all lapsed into a bit of puzzling, with some of James’ Berrocals being brought out to play – I’d decided I needed to have a bash at one after spending almost all of my time on a couple of boxes last time so I asked for an interesting one – and after a bit of discussion we settled on Romeo and Juliet, which James duly set down on a piece of carpet in front of me (probably a puzzle mat, come to think of it!). Kevin and Adin set about demolishing (and rebuilding) most of the anvils on one of the side tables – when James removed the first one, he decided that the table needed dusting so they would have to work their way through each one in order to enable him to dust the table properly … which is as good an excuse as any to have to work your way through several highly valuable intriguing puzzles!

While I slowly plodded through dismantling Romeo and Juliet, Kevin and Adin motored through the anvils – every now and then they’d ask James a question or two, and I just plodded along … after a little while I had a mat full of bits spread around more or less in the order I’d managed to remove them – so James wandered over to congratulate me, and mix up the parts a bit – nice chap, eh?

Oh dear!

Needless to say, reassembly was significantly harder than disassembly! Romeo and Juliet has a central pair of articulated pieces so the first order of business is reassembling those from their constituent parts and then figuring out where all the other bits go – the resulting process involved a lot of trial and error – usually about which order things need to go back together again because as you progress, you find the articulated bits have less and less movement, invariably this results in having a piece you want to fit in and not having enough range of movement left – so you take a few bits off and then retrace your steps – which is easier said than done – especially the first few times because the pieces are all rather unusually shaped and a bit disorientating – and remember that the two main bits are constantly changing shape as well… a couple of times I thought I was well on my way only to realise that I should have inserted a crucial piece right at the start … and unlike a wooden puzzle, there’s absolutely zero give in these bronze beasts! 

Kevin with a new lady-friend

It may have taken me the (very) best part of an hour, but I managed to get it back together and remounted (in both senses – this is a Berrocal after all!) without relenting and accepting James’ kind offers of the instruction manual. (Yes, I took that long that he took pity on me twice and offered me the instructions!) Romeo and Juliet is definitely fun as a puzzle – the joints make for an interesting puzzle and it’s a whole lot more than a work of art that doubles as a 3D jigsaw.

At some point Adin and Richard disappeared off into the kitchen with an Opening Bat and they'd made pretty good progress on it by the time I was leaving, so I'm guessing they probably cracked it ...

Boys and a Bat!

The second half of the tour kicked off just after that and James took us around the next two rooms in double-quick time. Half way around the second room James fished an interesting bunch of wires out of a drawer and pulled it open to reveal an incredible three dimensional lattice of wires with one of John Kostick’s four axis stars at each intersection – when I mentioned the artist’s name, he promptly pulled out one of John’s single four-axis stars as well – I mentioned it to Jane Kostick in an email that evening she was quite intrigued as John hadn’t made any of those in more than 20 years.

During the second half of the tour I was wandering around absent-mindedly playing with a little Kim Klobucher box and it ended up being my undoing – and becoming the one puzzle that I left behind unsolved that day – it was half open and I couldn’t work out how to go forwards or backwards – totally stumped. (Sorry James!)

After the second half of the tour, Kevin and I needed to beat a reasonably hasty retreat so that he could catch the last train up north as he was on call the next day. Before we managed to escape, James gave me a pile of homework in the form of a number of disassembled burrs that needed reassembly – two of them are 18-piece burrs and to be fair, at least we knew what one of them was called! The second 18-piece burr has pieces that look a bit Altekruse-ish, except there are too many of them, and they’re lopsided – so I have no idea how that one will turn out looking … there’s one with some totally bonkers looking pieces, and another that actually came with some assembly instructions (that one went together nicely, thanks). Tricky thing is that most of them are designer’s prototypes, and I suspect that some of them haven’t been published anywhere yet … so I may need to outsource some of these little challenges to some friends out there in internet-land … you know who you are…[Three days later and I’ve managed to do 3 out of the five so far … particularly proud of the one that turned out to be an unusual offset Oskar design called 2-in-1.]

I also picked up a mint condition copy of Edward Hordern’s book on sliding puzzles as I was leaving – I’m going to be in James’ debt for quite some time and may need to pick up several more loads of burrs for reassembly in order to make up for his kindness.

If anything, my second visit was every bit as mind-blowing as the first – Kevin and I were chatting about the privilege of being able to experience the collection, and James’ generosity in giving his time and energy to share it with all of us and the huge responsibility he shoulders in looking after it … now if only one of us would win the lottery so that we can help secure it for the next generation of eager puzzlers…

Thank you James. You sir, are a scholar and a gentleman and we remain in your debt!