Jack’s Tippenary Mystery Tour

A few years ago Jack Krijnen created a truly awesome sequential discovery puzzle in the shape of Jack-in-the-Box - I was a huge fan, so the when I picked up on the merest suggestion that he might just be working on another puzzle box, I made sure my he knew I was dead keen!

A few weeks ago I got the email to let me know that it was ready and a few days later I was opening the packaging and looking forward to another puzzling journey into the unknown. It’s a really handsome maple box with some very neat mahogany trim – name proudly laser-etched in the centre and some inviting-looking rods teasing you on the top of the box… and they seem to be repeated around the base of the box, but those ones seems even less keen to move than the ones on the top.

I spent quite a while trying to get into the box at first… I outed myself at our last VMPP for the fact that I’d made virtually no progress whatsoever in the first couple of weeks – some sympathised and told me the first set of locks was quite tricky… Jack just smiled and looked like the proud puzzle-maker he ought to be.  A few days after that Nigel got in touch and I shared what I’d ben doing and he seemed puzzled at my lack of progress as he reckoned another possibility should be “available” at that stage – only it wasn’t – and I’d been exploring some seriously wild and whacky ideas of what I might need to do next: I’d heard something occasionally moving around inside and I’d convinced myself that that sound, and the name were a suggestion that there was a hidden n-ary mechanism inside that needed blind manipulation, so I was trying to make that work… (Yup, that’s how far down the rabbit hole I’d gone…)

Nigel kindly encouraged me to try something that I’d tried may times before with no success, and so I kept going until I finally found the merest trace of a hint of the tiniest bit of movement – so I doubled down and even though my hands hurt, I executed that move… and it was lovely – but I hadn’t expected what came next at all…

The next puzzle took me ages of proper pen-and-paper puzzling to try and come up with a strategy for solving it… and then the penny dropped and I found the link I’d been missing, and I had to smile at Jack’s lovely sense of whimsy – I really LOVE that second puzzle!

Passing that brings up an old friend and I had a lovely time wandering through a familiar path knowing that there’d be another challenge still waiting for me…

…and of course there was – finally finding what I’d been expecting to make an appearance since the very beginning of my long journey – like seeing an old friend after being in lock-down – it was nestled there waiting for me… only it wasn’t – it was an imposter – well disguised, but an imposter nevertheless – yet far from feeling cheated, this actually provided another new adventure…

This one really keeps on giving – when you think you’re finished, this one keeps on giving and giving until you finally find Jack’s Extra Challenge – complete that one and you can call this puzzle properly solved.

Once again, I find myself writing about a puzzling journey where I can’t talk about the steps along the way as each one is such a wonderful surprise that I’d hate to rob anyone of the sheer joy of discovering each new layer beneath as you gently unwrap this puzzling onion… this one really surprises you a number of times as you work through to the final challenge – I can’t think of another puzzle that does it as beautifully and as plentifully.

Jack – it’s a masterpiece.

[After I’d finished wending my way through it the first time, I contacted Jack about the stiffness that we discovered had resulted from some super-unseasonal low humidity in the UK – definitely not the sort of thing I’d ever expected or experienced in the past – lack of humidity or precipitation is not something we’re known for in the UK! Jack insisted on fettling it for free and the first lock is now silky smooth and ready for visiting puzzlers to enjoy to the full – thank you, Jack!]

 

Another mini masterpiece

Almost eight years ago now (yikes!) Jack Krijnen made a gorgeous little Level 5 burr set that I raved about over here. Five years ago he produced his version of the Ultimate Burr set, and yes, I raved about that one too. This year Jack’s gone even further out on a limb and produced The Phoenix Family Burr Set – and yes, I’m going to rave about this one too!

The Phoenix Family comes in a gorgeous little walnut box, this time complete with an inlay of a phoenix rising from the flames. Inside the box you’ll find 45(!) burr pieces with their neat little tweezers for grabbing the pieces you want without having to tip them all out on the table) along with a set of cards covering the family history and laying out the pieces required for assembling a number of 18-piece burrs… yes, this is the first burr set designed specifically for 18-piece burrs. 

The cards explain that the genesis of a large number of the 18-piece burrs we know today, including Supernova, Tiros and Burrly Sane for Extreme Puzzlers, can be traced back to an original 2008 design from Alfons Eyckmans called Phoenix. Alfons and Jack developed the ideas in Phoenix to produce a significant number of 18-piece burr designs over the years, and now Jack has put together a burr set to allow the truly masochistic puzzlist to experiment themselves and explore the differences between Tiros and Barones all in the palm of their hands. The cards give the piece sets required for 12 high level burrs, starting from one requiring 134 moves (so trivial it hasn’t even been named!) right up to the 166-move Supernova. If you ask Jack nicely (of course I did!) he’ll also send you a handy BurrTools file that will let you explore all the possible assemblies with this set… and give you a handy assembly guide (‘cos there’s no way in heck I could assemble any of those without using BurrTools!).

Assembling any 18-piece burr always starts out like an exercise in dexterity – at least until you’ve got enough woodwork in place to start getting things to hold together on their own… and the joy of Jack’s little burr sets is that the pieces are small enough that you can easily support quite of few of them in odd positions while you’re starting out the first ten or so pieces – don’t get me wrong, you’re still going to need a bit of dexterity, but at least the weight of the pieces isn’t also playing against you!

Jack’s given you enough pieces in each colour so that when you’re constructing the main puzzles, you’re always going to have matching woods in each plane. Neat, eh? The pieces all have their identifiers laser-engraved on their ends so you can spot them easily in the box - a lot of thought has going into the selection and design, and a huge amount of care has gone into crafting this wonderful little set of monsters. 

It’s hard not to be impressed with The Phoenix Family! – Thank you for providing another inspiring little burr set, Jack!

Jack-in-the-Box

This is probably one of the hardest puzzles I’m going to write about in this blog – not because it’s difficult to solve (although it definitely is!), but because there is so much absolutely fantastic “stuff” that I can’t talk about because it would totally spoil the surprise for other puzzlers getting to play with this puzzle… so let’s see how I can talk about the former without committing the heinous crime of the latter. 

Jack Krijnen has been designing and making puzzles for years. I look forward to chatting to him at the Dutch Cube Day each year (something I was gutted to miss this year!) as he always has some wonderfully made little gems available at stupidly cheap prices – it seems he makes puzzles for the love of it, not for the money…

Over the years I’ve acquired several lovely little burrs and a couple of his burr sets, all in Jack’s own unique dinky form factor, as well as a number of fun n-ary puzzles from him. 

Earlier this year he sent up the bat-signal that he was working on his first puzzle box design… several milliseconds later I registered my interest. A short while later the Royal Mail delivered a box, somewhat less than lovingly, to my front door… sadly it appeared that someone had played football with the contents of the package, although on the outside, there didn’t seem to be much damage… inside however, quite a lot of the detailing that must have taken Jack absolute hours, had been reduced to wooden scraps. Fearful that I might damage the box, I exchanged a few emails with Jack and he encouraged me to puzzle on – so I did, albeit with a slightly heavy heart.

I made a little progress quite rapidly, not entirely as a result of the damage, but it probably provided a couple of clues that others unafflicted might not have seen quite as readily…

I found myself having blown the bloody doors off the thing, with a couple of tools in hand, and no apparent way to proceed… my little metal rod and my wooden key didn’t seem to be very useful, even though I’d found some keyhole-shaped orifices. 

At this point things sort of came to a halt – I went off to IPP38, spent a few weeks with my puzzling friends and didn’t think much about the puzzle box gently mocking my inability to progress – while somewhere in the back of my mind I had a niggling doubt about it perhaps being damaged internally as well…

At this point my friend Nigel asks how I’m doing on it – he’s stuck too, it transpires…I can’t help him much and over the course of a few days he gets a nudge or two and once the dam has broken, rapidly becomes a massive fan of this puzzle… telling me along the way that I NEED to SOLVE this thing – because I WILL LOVE IT!

I need several more nudges from him; in fact it’s probably fair to say that for one specific part I need encouragement to keep trying – and indeed to simplify what I’m trying to do! Once I’m through that bit, an entire new world opens up in front of me – quite literally, and I understand exactly why Nigel (and many others) are being so darn encouraging about it… the next phase comes as a wonderful surprise and it’s an absolute delight to solve…

…leading to the final reveal, and something I think I shall refer to as Jack’s Revenge on puzzlers for solving his puzzle box – inside there is an 18-piece burr, unassembled known as the “Assembler’s Challenge” – with good reason! Seeing where the pieces need to go isn’t the main challenge here – physically getting them there using only the single pair of paws most of us are endowed with, IS however, a MAJOR CHALLENGE.

I am a huge fan… there’s a bit toward the start of the solution that is tough – well I think it’s tough – some of my puzzling friends have almost breezed through it without slowing down (yup, Louis!) whereas others have needed the nudges I required… but everybody loves the reveal and the bit in the middle – that is superb. 

Jack – that is an excellent debut puzzle box… I hope you’re suitably encouraged to create many more designs!

Merry-go-round

If you liked Power Tower from Goh Pit Khiam and Jack Krijnen, then you’re going to love Merry-go-round from the same duo…

A couple of months ago I had an email arrive in my inbox from Jack with a picture of a Merry-go-round and an invitation to express an interest – now, dear reader, this will probably surprise you, but I expressed a lot of interest, immediately… in the name of research, of course. 

Jack duly came back and asked me what combination of pieces I wanted – apparently there isn’t a standard set, you get to make it up as you please… so we traded a few emails and he pointed out the folly of some of my ways and made some really helpful suggestions, and a few weeks later a neat little box of bits arrived in Barnt Green. 

Now, when you’re playing, Merry-go-round looks like a slimmed down version of the Power Tower, with a square central post and bumpy arms radiating outward – the post forces the arms to interact and depending on the number of bumps they have, they’ll produce binary, ternary, quaternary etc. movements. This design allows combinations of pretty much any n-ary-ness (see what I did there?) with as many arms as you like, up to the natural maximum for each post, of course…  

The top arm is a binary slider and then each arm below it can have any selected n-ary-ness – each successive arm can move one space when the arm above it has moved from one end to the other… repeat until done. 

Given my selection of arm lengths, Jack had suggested a pair of central posts with 4 and 6 slots respectively and I’m rather glad he did! (You’ll work out why later…) My sets of sticks came in two lengths and a selection of -aries. The shorter sticks start at ternary and work up to quinary – and there’s enough of those to fill the taller post (with the binary stick) and then there’s the longer set of sticks… that go from senary to septenary and novenary (or 6-, 7- and 9-ary if, like me, you needed to look that up!).  I know, that was a little silly of me…

Sometime before Christmas I duly loaded them up and set about assembling them – cunningly using the longer sticks in the short 4-slot post (Thanks Jack!) – significantly reducing the number of moves to complete the solutions…

After a few plays with them, and mixing and matching the bases to confuse myself (quite successfully!), I set about modelling them in BurrTools… and I have now established that with my sticks I can create puzzles using the 4-slot post with from as low as 22 moves (using some of the pieces backwards!), up to 1318 moves(!). The 6-slot post raises that to a rather heady 48948 – I am eternally grateful for Jack talking me into getting the 4-slot post, or else those longer sticks would hardly ever see any action at all…

Definitely the go-to-puzzle if you need a few hours (or more!) of n-ary therapy!