MPP XXXXCIIIIV

Another solo MPP with no residential visitors and by the time I’ve stopped at the shops to grab the drinks and milk, there are already a couple of familiar faces inside the hall and the chairs and tables are already neatly laid out – Steve and Phil have done an excellent job under Mike’s no-doubt strict oversight - thanks chaps!

We grab the gear and grub out the car and get the kitchen set up and the puzzles laid out: I’ve brought along a tub of 3D printed bits for Derek’s balls – aka Mr Bosch’s sphere assemblies - in various sizes for folks to have a bash at. There’s also a few new Karakuri acquisitions and a bunch of Bennos that have just arrived…and I can’t resist taking along Minima XIII just in case anyone hasn’t had a play with that one yet. 

Ali and the girls arrive and they set up camp at the back of the hall where they proceed to amuse themselves pretty much the entire day, inexplicably without any puzzles!  

Robin arrives with a bit of a fanfare, and a couple of huge 3D printed balls which he is duly goaded into rolling the length of the hall to see if they’ll spontaneously disassemble – they remain intact so some subsequent disassembly is required.

Knowing that I’d missed out on the Karakuri Skull from the recent update, Fraser’s brought along his copy for me to have a play with and I have a grand old time fiddling with it – the theming is lovely and it’s a fun solve – this looks like a promising start for newcomer hakuu!

Fraser’d also brought along a copy of the rather nutty musical cube – where each face has whistles with a common pitch – so in order to solve the cube you’re obliged to whistle a convoluted cacophony along the way – several folks admired it during the day but I don’t remember hearing anyone trying to solve or scramble it…

Ethel arrives with several large crates full of puzzles that we help her set out for the assembled puzzle-gannets to rifle through. She’s brought a shopping bag along for me with a bunch of things she’s agreed to sell me. Pretty much everyone has a rake through the crates and most end up taking a few things off her… and in spite of already having a bag-full, I have a rifle and end up with one of Gary’s impossible objects and a pair of jars with Hanayama’s assembled inside of them – one of which will replace one of my Japanese exchange puzzles that didn’t quite manage to get home in one piece (so I have a doubly impossible broken jar with a Cast Vortex inside of it that still won’t come out, either through the top of the jar or the hole in the side of it!).

Fraser and Steve had independently brought along a large pile of the Hayduck’s Decorative puzzles and several of those got a good playing with. They are beautifully made and have such luxurious and tactiles pieces that it’s easy not to think of them as jigsaw puzzles.

We descend on the village, and several pig rolls, a few kebabs and a vegan wrap are duly acquired and scarfed back at the hall. (No vegans knowingly harmed in the process – promise!)

Steve had brought along his copy of Juno’s Snub Star for the experts to assemble and thoughtfully not brought the instructions… there was an initial inspection of the (60!) pieces before they abandoned the idea until I’d managed to make a trip home to collect my set of instructions – when those duly arrived Chris and Dan appointed themselves chief assembleators with Steve supplying (sometimes) the right pieces for them. 

Things started in a fairly amusing manner with the assembleators furiously shunning external aids like masking tape to hold pieces in situ – resulting in some rather amusing pictures of Dan inserting bits while Chris attempted to hold things together. Once they got past that it was fairly plan sailing with only a few bits of back-tracking when bits hadn’t been inserted in the correct direction or in quite the right holes – they were pretty proud of their work when the key piece finally went in… and I suspect that Steve was mighty grateful!

Several folks spend a while assembling various incarnations of Derek’s Balls – some masking tape is sacrificed in order to retain some element of puzzler sanity – perhaps I should have brought more masking tape – time will tell… at least a few sets of nested balls and one or two singles end up going into the wild and I still have a few spares to take along to King’s Day next weekend.

I get to spend a while playing with Chris’ copy of Idan’s I Need My Lunch and get almost nowhere… I manage to remove one bit, but can’t get it to release any more of its secrets. While I’m fiddling with it, I am able to notice one or two absolutely fantastic bits of machining – you know the sort of thing where you wonder something to yourself and then notice that that thing will in fact do that rather unusual thing you’ve imagined it might be able to… this one is clearly an absolute ripper and I’m going to need to get myself a copy – even if that means it ends up kicking my ass for an age (or three!).

Almost everyone heads back up to Puzzling Times Central where the hounds are glad to see old friends and new shoes. Most people dig into the puzzle cave and come out with something interesting, some end up chatting in the kitchen and everyone seems to be having a fine old time.

I decide it’s time for a major break with tradition(!) and order a pizza delivery instead of heading down to the chippy for fish suppers… there doesn’t seem to be much disappointment and there’s not a huge amount of pizza left (especially after we manage to convince someone to take the last half a pizza home with them at the end of the night).

One of our smaller MPPs, but definitely another excellent day with my puzzling friends – thank you all!

 

MPP LCVIIII

Just less than a week after returning from DCD we’re all meeting up in the Barnt Green church hall for MPP LCVIIII – thanks to some bad foresight on my part and a slightly later than usual DCD.

Once again I don’t have anyone staying over so I have a relatively leisurely start to the morning, loading up virtually all of the puzzles I’ve brought back from HoustonTokyo (Thanks Steve!) and DCD for everyone to play with. A quick stop at Tesco to pick up the sodas and milk before opening up the hall and starting to set everything out. Phil, Mike and the Monkeys arrive pretty soon after that and they all muck in to put out the tables… 

I almost manage to stop Steve from creating a culturally inappropriate symbol in the centre of the hall using tables, and the puzzles are soon brought out to play…

Between us I reckon we end up with three or four sets of exchange puzzles so there’s plenty for everyone who wasn’t at IPP to have a go on. Steve and I ended up having a long philosophical discussion before putting the world properly to rights before we also dived into the puzzling delights on offer.

I’ve taken along my set of bits for an orderly tangle of pentagons from DCD in the hopes of getting someone to assemble it for me – I AM a lazy soul! I get my hopes up when Chris bites and assembles a perfectly interlocked chain of pentagons and declares it topographically equivalent to the orderly tangle… I’m not convinced and then Steve gets in on the act to experiment with making any shape but a pentagon… the pile of sticks is still a pile of sticks on my desk as I write this a week later… I missed Louis!

Several folks had a go at the Pelikan Safe – and I suspect most were successful although the final hurdle slowed everyone down a bit, as you’d expect!

I tried to get a few folks to have a go at Stefan’s exchange but the first stage proved a bit too challenging for puzzlers in search of a quicker puzzling fix – there was simply too much other shiny stuff around… speaking of shiny stuff, the Monkey’s had all their latest toys for sale, as did Phil so several folks ended up Sliding Away home and Making Love Easier – you’re welcome.

As usual Kevin had brought along copies of all the latest goodies from Pelikan and they had a jolly good playing with. The Raichos proved to be a big hit with all the box-lovers in the group – albeit some of them took an embarrassingly long time to open the simpler of the two.

By the time we got to the High Street for pig buns, we found they’d sold out an hour and a half earlier – it seems the locals have taken to eating them for breakfast now, meaning our chances of finding any at lunch time are getting significantly smaller… pity!

Kyle ended up making a lot more progress on Jammed Coin that I’d managed to, and ended up completing the solve later that evening at my place… which is a pity because that sort of ruins my excuse (“clearly it’s broken”)!

Robin had brought along a few constructions that amused Steve for ages while he assembled them, and then for a split-second while he spun them gently apart with those around cheering loudly. Robin was also the only person who took some of Ali’s giant (Monument!) Hanayamas apart – he shrugged it off, but we all recognised the mad skillz!

Anthony generously gave pretty much all who didn’t already have, a copy of his Robert Reid-designed space-filling tilings and I managed to get rid of a couple more exchange puzzles and several copies of my IPP42 gift Morph… which was also making a king-sized appearance courtesy of designer Mike, along with what appeared to be a close cousin, although, knowing Mike, no doubt the solutions will be nothing alike!

Several of us had a play with Steve’s clear prototype of Kawashima’s Duet Box – in spite of all of the side panels being clear acrylic, there still appeared to be something magical happening between some of the panels that was totally invisible…

With sunset coming earlier and earlier we packed up the hall and head for The Badgers where the puzzling continued on the dining room table until the fish suppers arrived.

As usual the cutest of the Karakuri boxes got a good playing with until the Gentleman Crocodile stopped all in their tracks… and not just because one of the legs was unceremoniously ripped off… the three-legged croc stubbornly refused all attempts at opening it and I was pretty sure I knew what needed doing… it remained firmly locked up until the next day when I confirmed my recollection of the solution was indeed spot on but it still wouldn’t budge. Remembering that I’d previously had a similar experience with an eager puzzle ripping off a leg I explored the theory that an earlier repair might be to blame for the current lock-up… and indeed that was the case – I’d helpfully glued the secret compartment shut… it’s fixed now for anyone who wants to try it again… but please don’t pull off his legs!

Everyone decided to leave at a pretty sensible hour which probably means we’re all getting old or possibly have kids to get back home to… it was great to see a couple of faces we haven’t seen for ages like Joe - it really feels like I’ve had heaps of puzzling with my mates recently – I am a rather lucky chap. Thanks to all who came along and made this another fine MPP!

 

MPP LCIIIIX

 

Once again there’s no one staying over for the weekend so my MPP weekend consists just of MPP itself. I head down to the hall via the shops to pick up some soft drinks and fresh milk with the rest of the gubbins already loaded up. Chris arrives while I’m still unpacking stuff from the boot and he immediately launches into setup mode, pulling out tables and spreading them around the hall before scattering the chairs around some of them.

It doesn’t take long for the monkeys to arrive with Michael and Lily in tow. Dan, Shane & Dale and Kevin & Kyle and Mike swell the ranks and Amy & Tamsin improve our diversity score a little.

I’ve taken my latest Karakuri Creations along and they generate a pretty solid level of interest throughout  the day with the steady progression really enjoying the Microscope and XY Mini, with fewer folks solving Shachihoko, which, in fairness, is not an easy solve!

Phil is distributing copies of his latest handiwork – Box 2 is a riff on Rocky’s Ice Bucket with a Wigfield twist. [I don’t get to spend any time on it at MPP, but do get some puzzling time the following evening and it has me thoroughly puzzled at this stage – there’s something obvious to do, but that doesn’t result in much happening at all… and in fact the couple of discoveries I made after that left me even more perplexed! At this stage I can however report that it’s beautifully made!]

Rich shoves a couple of puzzles in my paws – Basket Burr is an innocent-looking semi-caged burr reminiscent of Akaki’s Baskets and Dovetail Bar is a fiendish little pocket puzzle begging you to separate two pieces joined by a dovetail and held in place by some pixies between a couple of screws…. I find myself managing to separate the pieces the following evening only to find myself utterly perplexed as to why they didn’t just fall apart… Ali needs to say something to me to make me realise what’s happened that I’ve totally overlooked – Rich is indeed a very sneaky fellow!

The monkeys shift a few of their Bags o’ Tangles and some folks spend a while assembling a tangle or two, almost reducing Shane to tears at one point given how hard he’d been trying to assemble his copy without a huge degree of success. He spends a while talking me through the solution to one of his old puzzle locks that I’ve been singularly unable to solve properly. (Apparently randomly shaking it isn’t counted as a solve! This is troubling news given how many of my past solves rely on this technique!)

Matt and Chris arrive just as a few of us head out for pig rolls which are up to their usual standard. After lunch I sidle up to Matt and swap some cash for a copy of his second keyring puzzle.

Michael is dishing out copies of his new symmetry puzzle now christened Morph – which is quite appropriate given the solutions, albeit I’ve still only found one of the two solutions and I’ve had a copy since the last MPP!

Rich spends a while working on my copy of Midas – the latest Stickman Puzzlebox. He manages to make about as much progress as I’ve made before moving something that wasn’t for moving and ends up with a little extra piece where there shouldn’t be one… there’s plenty of analysis and advice and the conclusion is that it should be something even I am able to fix… (and this weekend has confirmed that to be the case). Rich gets mercilessly mocked for the rest of the day for this wanton act of destruction!

Shane gets challenged to reset a copy of his The Block Puzzle after someone “solved” it and then realised it was really tricky to reset… Shane performs admirably, eventually!

I’ve taken Pavel’s “What’s the name of this puzzle” along after we singularly failed to solve it over the King’s Day weekend. Dan embraces the challenge and soon has the cards neatly laid out on the floor, forgoing the several free tables so that he can connect properly with the cards… in what seems like mere minutes he announces he’s solved it – and while he might not have fully solved it, he’s certainly at least half solved it and a little encouragement sees him solve the rest of it… Dan’s way with words is strong.

We head back to the house where the puzzling and shenanigans continue – perforated gently by a round of fish suppers.

Rich decides he’s not going to be beaten by Stickman so begins dismantling the Borg Box while Chris reminds us all that Rob used to charge a fee for reassembling them, such was the demand when puzzlers realised just how complicated a full disassembly was. Rich does not require the services, although he did sensibly stop after disassembling a panel and a half…

While all that is going on, a few guys were playing with A House with Trees, trying to get it to solve perfectly and not always succeeding, so they developed a game which at one point involved locking it up without the lid in place… which makes solving it rather a lot harder in the absence of some rather crucial visual clues! There was a lot of laughter as each tried to out-shenanigan the next. Steve’s attempt to earn the minimum wage by opening the box to retrieve the £1 coins that Chris had successively hidden inside it was evidently doomed to fail from the start.

It wasn’t the biggest MPP we’ve ever had, but it was an absolute hoot – and definitely worth writing about… next one should be one heck of an event. Why not join us?

MPP LCVX

This was another slightly weird one for me: nobody staying for the weekend means I’m getting packed up at home on my own on a Saturday morning before heading down to open up the hall. Ali had let me know that they were going to be late as his car had developed an issue on the motorway, so they’d had to go back and swap cars and drivers…

Thankfully Chris was waiting in the car park when I got there so I had some help setting out the tables and chairs… to be fair, he probably ended up doing most of it while I wandered down to the shops to grab some milk and soft drinks… he's younger and stronger than me!

The gang didn’t take long to start arriving and by the time the lads from London pulled in, we had a goodly mob – there was bantering, a little puzzling and a bit of catching up with folks we hadn’t seen since last year. James had sent his best wishes to everyone, unable to attend as he’d done his back in, and Simon was keeping his carbon footprint low and just sent his best wishes.

Kevin had rather kindly brought me some puzzles that Tye had shipped over in a package to him – ta both - and Michael gave me a copy of his latest symmetry puzzle which I’ve only half-solved. Reminiscent of Bitten Biscuits, it consists of three partial circles with four round holes spread across the pieces. Your symmetry needs to include those holes and there are two distinct solutions… I’m usually absolutely rubbish at symmetry puzzles, but I did manage to find one of the solutions… more Think (c) required.

Dan and I had both had the same idea and printed off a large pile of Bram’s Hinged Cubes to give away. Pretty much everyone ended up taking at least one copy and spending a while playing with them. Not a single person just folded it together into a cube and pronounced it easy… most people managed to eventually fold a cube, usually via several visits to the not-a-solution, and everyone ended up wondering why it was so darned difficult. An experiment that continued back at the house later on, with some more serious attempts at analysis – Bram’s Hinged Cube provided without a doubt the largest amount of puzzling at MPP LCVX! (Thanks Bram for making it available on Printables!)

Amy had brought along her copy of Andrew Crowell’s QuantumTIC and she was in two minds about the elegance of some of the moves and she sought further opinions from folks who hadn’t already solved it… she duly got several folks views and the consensus was that she was the only dissenting voice and that it was indeed a brilliant puzzle! (It's probably the first time she's ever been wrong though.)

The Monkeys had brought along a copy of their latest not-quite-ready-for-distribution design and a few folks had a bit of a play with them – although nobody was stupid brave enough to try taking any of them apart. There was a bit of a chat about the feasibility of nesting them, but that’s probably worth a separate blog post.

Andrew Coles sidled up to me at one point and offered me a copy of his latest Puzzle Lock – which I think I’ve previously seen as a bit of a prototype – cash changed hands and a neat white box was dropped into my crate to take home… no doubt that will feature in a separate blog post shortly too…

I’d taken the Karakuri Christmas presents along for folks to fiddle around with and they all managed to raise a smile as several folks worked their way through all of them in turn – yet again they really are pitched at a lovely level of difficulty: none of them are trivial, most are really fun to solve and they all look smashing! And if they weren’t already all sold out(!), I’d encourage you to sign up for them as they’re also great value for money!

I enjoyed playing with a prototype that Phil’s been fiddling with recently – I suspect I followed his intended solution path as I found myself doing some things I thought should be useful only to find myself slammed up against a brick wall, and when I glanced over at him, he was grinning broadly. That one’s going to be another lovely little puzzle when it’s ready…

Steve Ali had brought along a pile of oddly milled sticks that he reckoned could be “assembled” – so Rich and Chris took up the challenge and settled down at a quiet table and began trying to hold multiple sticks in various orientations dictated by the brief instructions that he'd rather thoughtfully provided. The first couple of attempts ended in a bit of a racket as the sticks fell on the table, but it didn’t take them long to complete the resulting Hybrid Burr. After that, Steve and I played a short game of chicken playing anti-Jenga with it, but we both decided discretion was the better part of something-or-other and left this majestic piece assembled.

I spent a while playing with a dexterity puzzle that Andrew had made for a friend – you’ll notice I didn’t say “solving” in there! At first glance it looked like a fairly exacting pure dexterity puzzle – only the more you played with it, the less you seemed to be able to do what you actually wanted to – and the more strange forces seemed to be trying to stop you… at this point Andrew took pity on me and talked me through some of what I was experiencing and how I could get around those hurdles – but I still couldn’t actually execute the steps required. A couple of minutes in his hands and the puzzle was indeed securely solved… confirming that I am rubbish at dexterity puzzles, particularly really trick(s)y ones! (Damn clever design from Andrew!)

One of the other puzzles that got quite a bit of playtime was Bicolor 1365 – a box-packing puzzle from Koichi Miura. I just loved the fact that there are 1365 solutions with the lid the wrong way around (i.e. colours not matching) and only a single solution to put the lid on the box with the colours matching… several people spent a while trying and mostly managed to find one of the many wrong assemblies – and one or two managed to deduce the unique proper solution – well done!

The pig rolls / kebabs were as good as they always are (although some managed to just miss out!), and the fish supper back at my plaice went down well. Yet more puzzling, including quite a bit do analysing just why Bram’s Hinged Cube seems so hard: no matter what your approach is, you seem doomed to fail.

Thanks to everyone who made MPP LCVX another one to remember!

 

MPP LCIIII

[I think that's what I ended up calling it on the day...]

This one starts with a Friday 5pm airport run to collect three blokes from The Netherlands and a chap from Bulgaria… I time the first arrival almost perfectly and the Dutch contingent isn’t too far behind and soon enough we’re all piled into Gill’s Mini heading for Barnt Green. <…begging the question “How do you fit 5 puzzlers in a Mini?”>

The hounds give the visitors a very warm welcome before we chuck some pizzas in the oven and settle down to some dinner. After dinner the puzzles come out and there’s a familiar buzz of puzzlers chatting and challenging one another with their current favourite puzzles.

Stefan’s been printing more of his tiny puzzles and he gives me a copy of the Kostick’s RDS Interlock that is 9.5mm across… and yes, it is actually a fully working copy, complete with the spare plates for anyone stupid enough to want to try some of the additional challenges. Stefan’s 3D printing skills at this scale are truly remarkable… he also insists on gifting me a full-size copy to replace the one I gave to James a couple of weeks ago… thank you, sir!

Wil gives me a really cute stand for my Butterfly Puzzle from a Belgian friend of his – complete with a puzzling compartment to store the extra tool that I've never taken out of it's sealed home… ;-) That’s going to display the puzzle really nicely in the Strijbos section of The Hoard. Thanks Wil!

We puzzle until sometime around midnight Dutch time and then I run the boys down to their Airbnb and head home to crash.

Next morning, Stefan and I grab some breakfast and load up the Mini with a few crates of puzzles before swinging by the boys to collect them on the way to the hall. Soon after we get there the puzzlers begin descending from all around the countryside. We have the usual bunch from London-ish, several folks from up north, including Fraser from north of The Wall. Andrew represents the south and there’s even a couple of us from the Midlands – there must be about 25 of us all told by the time everyone’s arrived – a goodly bunch!

I’ve done my usual thing of printing off a bunch of spare copies of puzzles that I’ve ben toying with recently and leave them in a pile for anyone who wants a copy… Dan and I both end up giving away a bunch of George Bell’s Second Stellations and I manage to get rid of a pile of sundry Barcode Burrs that Louis and I had managed to partially assemble the night before after the essential hardware for assembling them got delayed in the post. [We really are incredibly fortunate to have designers like Lee and George who’ve happily published their designs for anyone to print their own copies and give them away.] By the end of the day I’m down to one last copy of Second Stellation that has now been added to The Hoard.

Steve gives me a box with a few recent arrivals from Japan and an incredibly generous gift and refuses to take any money for the Japanese goodies – thanks mate! At least I can reciprocate and give him a copy of Yuu Asaka’s Jigsaw 28, but I’m still well in his debt.

Wil has a large table of his wares displayed and there’s the usual knot of puzzlers around the table pretty much all day sampling the wares and buying things – I mean, where else can you pick up a new copy of his Butterfly Puzzle and a display stand for it? He has copies of his recent exchange puzzles and plenty copies of his new Bottle Puzzle and he’s giving away copies of his latest symmetry puzzle that still has me puzzled from my DCD trip…

Richard has brought along a large selection of his 3D printed puzzles – including a number of Happiness Cubes – nicely printed in matching colours with their names neatly printed on one side. I think he’s gone and done something clever to import the data in an efficient manner in order to generate all the pieces and add all the finishing touches auto-magically – he’s a clever lad! <Correction: he's not a clever lad - he did it all by hand and clearly enjoys dull repetitive jobs!>

I spend a while playing with a couple of identical looking 5-piece burrs – one is a design he stumbled across [Switchboard Burr by Jim Gooch] and the other is his variation on it that removes a potential false solution and forces a really interesting series of moves that I don’t think I’ve seen on another burr… but don’t take my word for that as I’m not really a burr-guy!

During the course of the day several folks have a bash at Rich’s puzzles and generally find them rather hard to reassemble so a growing pile of pieces begins to form on Rich’s table – and then at some point some slightly more mischievous puzzlers remember the Immense Happiness that resulted from disassembling a large number of Happiness Cubes and leaving them all in a big pile. During the course of the day there must have been at least ten puzzlers contributing to the growing pile of pieces to challenge Rich. Things went badly downhill when one of the Monkeys decided it would be even more fun if some of the pieces were hidden – so a veritable arms-race ensued of Rich trying to count the pieces into one of his crates (to ensure he had a multiple of six and might be reasonably sure that he had all the bits he needed) while Steve tried to thwart that by adding or removing handfuls of bits… no puzzlers were harmed in the making of this mayhem.

Fraser played Santa inviting everyone to reach into his sack and help themselves to one of his balls – little white ones with a clear centre line and some ball bearings visible inside… several folks had a fiddle with his balls in the hall but I didn’t spot anyone solving them there – which I suspect made Fraser very happy. I got to play with mine the next morning and really enjoyed the solve – although I was surprised by just how much came out of that little ball when I did solve it… to the point that I found resetting it almost as challenging as the solve. Nice one Fraser – those balls are very nicely put together - and thank you!

Mike had brought along a bunch of Coremods’ new dexterity puzzles and several folks had some particularly choice words when they picked up one or two of them – my particular favourite was when folks noticed that the cake spun on its axis – at which point the most common reaction was “…kinell!” followed shortly thereafter by picking up a different puzzle. One or two of them managed to stay solved long enough for folks to admire them but generally the act of picking them up was more than enough to reset the little blighters! (I expect that will bring the designer a good degree of satisfaction!)

Phil had brought along a puzzle box he’d been working on and he did a fairly swift trade on the few copies he’d brought along. I took one for The Hoard and got to play with it on the Sunday morning – and there’s some very nice camouflage and misdirection in there – as always Phil’s machining is excellent!

Adin had brought several copies of his new design “Burr.exe ERROR” that looks absolutely brilliant – although his description of it as “just a caged burr” is really underselling it! He’s really embraced getting a 3D printer and his design mojo has clearly ramped right back up again… he’s produced a thoroughly intriguing six-piece burr trapped at a funky angle in a solid base… with some great detailing on the bases given some of the instructions… great job that man!! (I really enjoyed that solve on the Sunday as well – it’s a really nice solve where the “cage” does an unexpectedly good job of restricting things!

I managed to totally throw my name away when I told Steve I hadn’t managed to solve the latest puzzle he’d got for me from Endo-san… I’d managed to convince myself that the drawer could be extended in literally any direction and orientation, but I couldn’t find a cunning way to separate the two pieces in the couple of months that I’ve had the puzzle… at which point Steve pointed out that it wasn’t really a puzzle, just an interesting mechanism that amused Endo-san… the two parts didn’t come apart after all… and if I’d translated the Japanese description, I’d have saved myself several hours over the course of the last few months. [Insert own smart R’s comment here.]

Chris managed to lower the tone (quite an achievement given some of the folks there!) by renaming my latest Karakuri purchase while Steve has trying to solve it, reducing several of us to giggling school children for quite a while – and I’m never going to be able to look that little otter in the eye again without raising a smile.

Kevin had brought along a couple of Aaron’s diabolical creations and none of us was surprised when they remained thoroughly unsolved during the course of the day. He also brought along a bunch of the recent Pelikan creations and gifted some spare copies to a couple of us – thanks a stack for my copy of Fabrick!

It was great to see Shane after a bit of an absence due to the day job intervening – he’s always an absolute scream – and his surprised reaction whenever he solves anything is hilarious! Great to see you again, Shane!

Steve had a brainwave and brought along a bunch of puzzles he needed help identifying and that seemed to go quite well until the little bits of paper with the names/designers on them mysteriously vanished at some point… although I think they may have turned up later after Steve mentioned that he managed to remember all of the names that had been scribbled on the notes… thus dramatically reducing the jeopardy! There was an element of jeopardy that remained as the puzzles themselves seemed to spontaneously disassemble at one point. I’m sure it wasn’t simply a case of payback!

We had about eighteen folks join us for the traditional fish supper back at our place afterwards so there was a fair amount more puzzling until folks began to drift homewards.

The Dutch contingent continued puzzling for another hour or two until the lateness of the hour made some of them need their beds a bit more than others, so I dropped them at their place and duly crashed.

Next morning I gave Stefan some breakfast and dropped him off at the airport for the start of his long journey home before collect the Dutch contingent one last time ahead of some more puzzling and a bit of lunch.

Louis provided his usual sterling service at solving some of the puzzles that have eluded me for far too long – yup, he made pretty short work of most of them – it’s fine! I’m not a proud man! LOL

One or two puzzles did remain unsolved, including Pitt’s Blocked in Box which has remained unsolved since July… I’m beginning to think it might be hard.

After lunch and a final round of chocolate tart I dropped the boys off at the airport for their afternoon flight… marking the end of another thoroughly enjoyable MPP weekend – thank you all for making it thus!