Houston, we had a problem here

When Brian Young recently announced that he was retiring from full-time puzzle-making, I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in the puzzling world hoping that he wouldn’t be going full-on cold-turkey and that we’d occasionally still see something interesting popping up from him…

Cue sitting around at IPP41 and Brian says “Here, what do you think of this?” passing over a familiar looking box, that upon closer inspection isn’t familiar at all! Brian’s taken the shell of a standard MI Toys puzzle box and ripped out all of the puzzle-bits… and then replaced them with a little something of his own design – a bit like Kelly Snache’s up-cycling of old tea and cigar boxes.

Brian’s result is a gorgeous looking creation with the majority of an acrylic maze on display inside the box and most of the usual decoration from the original box still there on the outside… there’s a little extra lasered text differentiating it from the original donor puzzle – if the acrylic maze in the new window wasn’t sufficient.

The blurb on the box gives you the usual warnings [no external tools, no hitting and no gaffer tape (really, we need to say that now?!)] and then goads you into opening the box while noting that gravity may be more of a hindrance than a help… great!(Makes mental note to turn on local gravity field displacement device.)

A bit of inspection shows there’s a little ball bearing in that acrylic maze, so clearly you know what you have to do… and that kept me amused for a while, until I ran out of things to do and all the things I’d tried weren’t exactly being useful… so after a little thought, and some experimentation, and reminding myself of the devious fellow behind this bit of up-cycling, I found some really interesting things… and then a whole new world opened up to me – now we’re away to the races!

…and there I stopped, making no further progress – but having done enough that I know I want a copy and I tell Brian that – and I think he allows himself a bit of a smile knowing that he’s stopped me dead in my tracks…

I secure a copy from him at the puzzle party and then have a chance to play with it back at home a couple of weeks later… I can easily retrace those initial steps and find myself back in the same spot once again – thoroughly confuzzled.

A little Think(c) and a fair amount of experimentation until a little more Think(c) makes me ask myself “What if I could…” and that brings a new avenue to explore… and while it doesn’t seem nearly as intricate, it’s doing something new, and that’s usually good thing on a solve…

It is a good thing, and I open the box and get to see all the innards that had me stumped in each of the phases – they’re all elegantly simple, and nicely devious… just the sort of thing that you’d expect from Mr Puzzle himself.

Here’s hoping that Brian’s experiments in retrofitting his own mechanisms into donor boxes continues because this one’s a cracker!

[Brian had a small run of these available for sale at IPP41 - they were all sold.]

Brian’s Big Baffling Bolt

Several moons back Brian asked if a couple of us would mind playtesting part of a puzzle he was developing – OF COURSE, we’d love to – and a little package with an oversized brass bolt duly appeared in the post. The accompanying note invited us to remove the washer that was sandwiched between a pair of brass nuts (insert own inappropriate joke here – it’s all about knowing your audience). It also said that Brian was worried it might be too simple...

The following weeks showed Brian he needn’t worry about it being too easy... I spent about a week solving it, or so I thought, before I passed it onto the next volunteer... and so it proceeded with most taking a week or more before they passed it on... with all of us giving Brian some feedback along the way...

Fast forward a month or two and Brian and Sue arrive to spend some time with us and attend an MPP and Brian opens up the box he’s posted over to himself and produces a few advance copies of his Big Baffling Bolt for sale - I throw cash at him to secure my copy and then watch at MPP as the available copies are eagerly hoovered up by puzzlers desperate to test themselves...

I don’t get to play with it until a couple of days later while Brian’s still visiting... the bolt (and attachments) all look very much like the prototype I thought I’d solved, only it now rests on a rather handsome Papua New Guinean Ebony base.

The solve starts off pretty much as I remember it, but after a little while I find myself facing a bit of a brick wall that I hadn’t encountered previously and I notice that Brian is grinning at me – turns out I’d fluked an important part of the puzzle and the designer in Brian had been deeply offended – to the point that he had designed out any chance of ever fluking that part of the solution again... what a nice man!

I spent a long time on that little bit of the solution until Brian reminded me of something and a little while later I’d retrieved the washer from between the two nuts. (Don’t...) 

The rest of the puzzle was totally new to me and I rather liked that bit... but I need to say that the first series of challenges is truly sublime – definitely worthy of its place as a celebration of 30 years of all that is wonderful about Mr Puzzle. 

Happy Anniversary Mr Puzzle! 

...and now that Brian has more formally released his Big Baffling Bolt at IPP40, I feel like I'm allowed to tell my story, so there you go.

Wine Not

 Last year Gill managed to track down an incredible surprise for my birthday – she colluded with friends of ours to get me a copy of Brian’s 1998 limited edition Wine Not. (Yup, she’s amazing!)

Over the years I’ve been trying to plug some of the many gaps in my collection of Brian’s puzzles, but there are some that really don’t come up for sale very often… Wine Not is one of those! Hardly surprising given that he only made a dozen copies, and that was about 23 years ago!

Wine Not is Brian’s riff on a two-dimensional design in EM Wyatt’s classic Puzzles in Wood. Wyatt’s version consisted of a pair of interlinked squares called Locked Links. Brian’s trades the squares for cubes and results in a structure that looks remarkably like a wine rack, unless you look at it closely, at which point you realise there’s actually no place for the wine bottles to go, given the overlap between the cubes…

The puzzle starts out as a fairly large pile of sticks – neatly a dozen in Queensland Walnut and another dozen in Queensland Silver Ash… examining the sticks shows your that there are definite sets of similar pieces and some of there are a little unusual which provides a bit of a clue as to how the structure goes together…

Decide on a strategy and begin to piece things together, and as long as you’ve thought things through properly, you should find you can end up with a pair of neatly interlocked cubes without having to resort to bending the pieces. [Spoiler Alert: Brian’s bits don’t bend!]

Definitely a statement piece in the collection now. This one stands proud among most of Brian’s creations – not just because of it’s size. :-)

Thanks Gill and Sue for all the collusion and spoiling me rotten for my birthday last year!

Abraham’s Well

Short version: Classic puzzle from the master of sequential discovery, Brian Young.

Slightly longer version: When I saw the warning email from Sue about the upcoming release I made sure I’d left a note for myself to check the website on the right day – sure,  there would be 150 copies available on the first day (with another 350 along behind that at some point) but there are lots of puzzlers out there that know just how good Brian’s puzzles are. Add to that those two magical words: “sequential discovery” and you can be sure that there’s going to be a huge amount of interest…

In the end, the ordering process was pretty straight-forward and I even managed to add a couple of other things to the order that I’d been meaning to pick up for a while, as well as some of their discounted own-brand disentanglements (mainly because I’m rubbish at those and desperately need the practice!).[That first batch only lasted 12 hours...!]

EMS then teased me for over a week with my care package apparently sitting on the tarmac in Brisbane being “Processed by air carrier” daily, but seemingly making no headway whatsoever. Once or twice Nigel and I swapped messages as both of our packages seemed to be stuck in the same limbo… and then all of a sardine, that changed and AusPost let me know my parcel had landed in the UK… and a day or two later it duly arrived in Barnt Green… this past Friday…

Yesterday I took it out for a bit of a play and found myself getting somewhat hooked on it – it makes for a nice little hand-full. There’s some lovely silky wood for the base and some very neat brass and steel work on the upper half. It thoroughly looks the part – right down the etched brickwork on the sides of the well. There’s a little bit of rope hanging down into the brass-lined(!) well, but no apparent pail. As you’d expect, there’s the usual Mr Puzzle branded logo on the base… and ostensibly, that’s all!

A closer examination yields a hole in the brass well-lining, and the cross-bar at the head of the well seems to turn forever… those two little screws at the head of the well may well have knurled edges, but there’s no way that you’re going to undo those without a more appropriate tool than your hands.

And that dear reader, is it… nothing seems to move, nothing seems untoward – there is nowhere to go… so you might as well start puzzling a little more seriously now. Or decide that you’ve bought a well-made ornament for your puzzle cave.

Over the course of Saturday I found myself puzzling in spurts – using my normal attack of puzzle until I get frustrated with a lack of progress – put the puzzle aside and then spending some time Think(c)ing – and return to said puzzle with a new line of attack…

That approach served me quite well over the course of Saturday and by the early evening I had a growing pile of pieces, some of which had been pretty handy as tools and I was more or less running out of places to go on this little puzzle – which concerned me a little as I knew I wasn’t finished yet: Brian is clear that when you’re finished, you’ll know it and you'll have a pewter object that links the well and Australia (which is all rather intriguing).

I knew I wasn’t finished as I hadn’t found anything made of pewter yet…

So I left it on the desk in bits and returned to it again this morning… and managed to spot something I’d overlooked the night before and a couple of minutes later I had my little pewter prize in my sweaty little paws… with a huge grin on my face.

Abraham’s Well shows that Brian’s not only a great designer of puzzlers’ puzzles, but he also has a wicked sense of humour… early on I thought I really wanted something, and Brian delivered – exactly the wrong thing! I’m pretty certain that he knew exactly what he was doing – I can see him sitting there saying to himself “Let’s get their hopes up and then crush them – it’ll be fun!”.

Brian’s description of the puzzle talks about having twenty odd bits and pieces by the time you’ve taken it all apart, with quite a few of them being quite useful little tools – only, working out which of them are tools and which aren’t is at least half the fun. [I imagined some wonderfully complicated tools during the course of my solve!]

Having got to the end of the solve, and then reassembling it for the requisite photographs, I knew which puzzle I was going to be writing about this week – in fact I’m probably not going to shut up about how good this one is for a while!

If you missed out on the first batch, there’s another 350 of them along in due course… Brian’s hoping to have them in his shop for a while… I’m not sure how successful he’s going to be at that – it is an excellent puzzle – you (and all of your puzzling friends) will want one.

Virtual Midlands Puzzle Party

[Apologies for the rubbish quality of the pics in this post - they're virtually all captures from my video recording of the sessions.]

COVID-19 has well and truly played havoc with our well-planned puzzle party timetable – not only has it forced the postponement of our International Puzzle Party, but it’s also caused the cancellation of not one, but two Midlands Puzzle Parties. Things were getting dire. It’d been months since we’d seen one another and enjoyed one another’s “encouragement” and I was missing my mates… so we mooted the idea of a virtual MPP and a fair few people thought that might be a fun idea… so we set about organising something that would mean there’d be something for everyone around the puzzling time zones to participate in.

Nick offered to draw up a custom puzzle hunt for the day, Frank chipped in a couple of print-cut-and-solve puzzles, Ali came up with a fun puzzle challenge that we were sure that everyone would be able to join in on, I pulled together a somewhat-puzzle-based quiz from some of the games a bunch of us have been playing on Sunday evenings, the guys produced a few scavenger hunts, and I arranged a couple of video tours that I thought would interest pretty much every puzzler I knew. We decided that we’d hold the first VMPP on the next planned MPP date and then planned out three two-hour sessions, each with a “main event” and a few supporting acts to keep the gang amused. I deliberately spaced the three sessions out during the day so that we could include folks from Australia and the US in some of the sessions without them having to get up or stay up until silly o’clock… although several of our US  friends ended up joining pretty much every session anyway – starting at very-stupid-o’clock in the morning for most of them!

The first session kicked off at 9am UK-time and we ran through the rough order of events and Nick introduced the puzzle hunt that he’d cooked up for us – it’s over at puzzles.baxterweb.com/mpp if you’re also interested… and at the same page, there’s a small collection of print-and-solve puzzles from Markus Gotz, Kohfuh Satoh (thanks Kohfuh!!) and our own Frank, for you to have a bash at. I really liked all the folding puzzles and heartily recommend them – and they’re there for free! What’s not to like.

Nick’s puzzle hunt consisted of three chapters themed to our MPP hero-on-the-run, Chico Banan, with a final meta chapter to be released after the afternoon session. Having play-tested the hunt during the week before, I was seriously encouraging folks to team up and have a go at it with some friends! (And ask for hints if you get stuck… I know, blasphemy!) The puzzle hunt and the answer-checking / leader board are still up at the URL above – have a go if you haven’t already tried – it will make use of your mechanical puzzle knowledge and test the little grey cells.

After the introduction of all the puzzles and the hunt, we ran a short scavenger hunt with points awarded pseudo-randomly in expert fashion by Big-Steve – there were several steward’s enquiries and the scoring of the random entry of a sock will probably enter MPP-lore – that none-too-contentious act did result in people being encouraged to take part in the subsequent scavenger hunts on the grounds that by not yet taking part, they were already beating Shane and his sock.

The main event in the morning session was Brian and Sue Young giving us a guided tour of Brian’s Puzzle Room, the floodlit giant puzzles in the garden (courtesy of the floodlights especially rigged-up for the tour!) and then Brian’s workshop and order processing stations. <There’s a YouTube video of the morning session over here.> It was lovely to see the very first puzzle Brian ever got: a wire heart & stirrup puzzle that his grandad had made for him while down the mine he was working in, and then to see Brian presenting his favourite three (or four!) puzzles. It was really special hearing the story behind Big Ben produced for his friend John’s only ever exchange – it obviously still means such a lot to Brian that he was able to do that for John.

Heading down to the workshop they stopped to show us the full-sized Telephone Box puzzle, the gigantic Big Burr at the bottom of the garden and the massive chicken disentanglement, before heading into the workshop itself and working progressively around all the different processing stations, with Brian stopping to show us how he makes his jigs and sets up the processes to make sure that he can design out any chances of error in the process. (He’s clever, that man!)

Brian gave us a sneak peak at his latest sequential discovery puzzle still in development and then settled down for a Q&A session, where Tomas was quick on the draw to ask about the progress on Brian’s ’66 Mustang (spoiler: not a lot – he’s been too busy making puzzles for the past twenty years!). We also got a little peak at the ’48 Ford that’s also on the list for some improvements.

Brian fielded all manner of questions about his approach to designing puzzles, his opinions on expensive table saw accessories and how the shop-side of things runs… it was wonderful being allowed in behind the curtain, as it were, with Brian and Sue being wonderful hosts and tour-guides – thanks guys!!

The afternoon session kicked off at 1pm after an hour or two to recharge, grab some lunch and get the final few things organised for the next session. Big-Steve gave us a catch-up on the scavenger hunt leader board, reminding everyone who’d just joined for the day that they were all in front of Shane already thanks to his -1 for the random sock picture.

We ran a short Soma Cube Challenge that Ali had dreamed up for us for a bit of a laugh: we described a series of challenges and the first few puzzlers to complete the challenge got points… normally points would mean prizes, this time they did not, they were in fact pretty pointless, but it did make for some good laughs along the way. It also resulted in quite a number of folks playing along with exactly the same Soma Cubes: the original versions in rosewood made in Denmark for Parker Brothers.

After the excitement of the Soma Challenge, Steve Canfield took us on a tour of his Puzzle Library, showing us shelf upon shelf of wonderfully collectible puzzle Boxes and beautifully crafted mechanical puzzles. By popular demand the tour took a bit of a detour at the end to travel via the magical (and also puzzling!) cabinet of Booze – the other important part of Steve’s regular blog posts. <There’s a YouTube video of the afternoon session over here.>

George and Roxanne were the main attraction in the afternoon session taking us on the full walking tour of the Puzzle Palace – starting outside and then heading in between the floating shelves of mini Berrocals (stunning idea, George!) before embarking on a room-by-room tour with Rox talking about the contents along the way. Room after jaw-dropping room of puzzles seemed to just keep coming with several parts of the collection being absolutely magnificent on their own – like the endless shelves of exchange puzzles and the - quite literally complete – collection of the Berrocal multiples.

Rox is clearly really passionate about the collection and seems to love nothing more than to share it with others! Including taking us up into the loft that serves as even more puzzle storage and display area, and the beginnings of a printer farm for George.

Popping out of the loft into the garage was the cue for Rox to hand over to George for a tour of his workshops, with George showing us around the big machinery in the garage (including several demos along the way) before heading inside to the 3D printing lab with all manner of printers set up for a variety of different tasks, ready and waiting. 

George and Rox then sportingly answered all our questions about the puzzles and about the 3D printers they’d chosen for George’s new farm – thanks guys – it was super being able to hang out with you in the Puzzle Palace.

Before breaking for the afternoon, we issued a big scavenger hunt challenge for everyone to have a bash at during the break until the afternoon session, and we released the final chapter in the Chico Banan puzzle hunt – and at this stage I think there was only one team on the leader board, although they’d managed to break it and had had to enter themselves three times in order to record their completion of the first three chapters. (But we won’t remind Taus and Rod that they broke it, promise!) ;-)

We had a good few hours between the afternoon and evening sessions so a couple of teams managed to get themselves onto the leader board and even finish off the final chapter in the Banan saga – it’s somewhat epic and the final meta is an absolute joy to solve – well worth the effort IMHO… and if you want to have a go at it, feel free to ask for clues if you get stuck…

At the start of the evening session Big-Steve gave us a quick round up of the scavenger hunt scores (Yup, Shane was still safely behind even those who hadn’t bothered to take part!) before we headed into the Pu(B)zzle Quiz – the evening’s “main event” – styled after a classic British pub quiz, we had a lot of puzzle-related questions not-so-cunningly woven in among some standard trivia-fare. We started out with a relatively simple round of True/False before heading into the eponymous Cheese or Train Station round (you had to be there!). The next round was the heavily puzzle-related “Soma Chanted Evening” round with trivia questions about the classic puzzle and a West End musical. Several rounds of Puzzle Links led up to the eagerly-awaited IcoNick Movie Scenes round before we broke for an intermission and a final round blitz scavenger hunt...with Big-Steve taking care of all the scoring again. 

The second half had more of the same, along with a round of Spot the IPP logo (harder than it sounds!). We tested their artistic talents with a round where we asked them to draw the flags of some of our IPP and MPP friends – where we learned that puzzlers do not make good sketchers of flags! The second round of IcoNick Movie Scenes may have left some images indelibly seared into some puzzlers’ minds – sorry about that!

Amusingly, as I sit writing up this blog post a couple of weeks later, I cannot even remember who got the top score on the quiz or on the scavenger hunts, but I do remember very vividly having a lot of laughs along the way… and that made all the schlepp of getting everything set up, massively worthwhile… and judging by some of the comments afterwards, I wasn’t the only one who had a good time that day, so I guess we should do this again sometime… maybe even on the date we’d planned for the next real-world MPP.

[Thanks to all the folks who helped out behind the scenes to get things organised, contributed to the quiz and all the other games we lined up, and generally provided encouragement. See you in November...]

Links to the videos: 

Afternoon session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS8P1oEA0Cc

Morning session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6lhpf-iEJg&t=12s