MPP iXL

I collect Louis from BHX sometime after supper and I drag him kicking and screaming up to the puzzle cave – I have puzzles he needs to solve – lots of them! (The truth is not nearly as amusing, so I'm sticking with my version of events.)  I’ve brought back literally hundreds of puzzles from IPP and he’s only seen about half of them already – there’s work to be done.

I point him at a couple of favourites and watch slack-jawed as he churns his way through them – when I lose the ability to keep my eyes open, I leave him with a long line of puzzles – all of which are duly solved when I wake up the next morning. 

After breakfast we head down to the hall via some exciting detours, and get things opened up and the tables spread around the hall. We just about manage to get everything sorted between the two of us before the gang starts arriving, which is unusual – the last few MPPs there’s always been someone already at the hall when I’ve got there, keen for things to get started. The biscuits and cakes are laid out and the drinks set up – I caffeinate and start chatting to the arrivals and pointing out some good new finds. 

I have literally taken my entire Japanese puzzle haul to the hall for the hordes. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) There’s a full set of exchange puzzles along with more than a hundred other little things I’ve found at various puzzle shops and puzzle parties. 

Ali brings Big-Steve and Michael from the big-smoke and Shane arrives in the lock-mobile. Kevin arrived looking somewhat flustered – not his usual fresh-as-a-daisy look – so he draws a fair amount of abuse – any excuse really… I collect Ed from the station and drag him through the current road-works-hell of Barnt Green’s main street. 

The Two Brass Monkeys have brought along copies of the Nova Plexus for all interested puzzlers and I’m not the only one foisting cash in Big-Steve’s hands – I add a stainless steel and brass set to the shiny brass copy I already have at home. Ali assembles a couple of copies so that folks can see them in the flesh. There’s some idle banter about whether two copies could be assembled in an interlocking manner and later on that afternoon Louis puts some quality time into proving that it probably isn’t possible after all. We have fun trying though… and find out just how tough it is assembling a left-handed copy if you’re used to assembling them right-handed. 

We have a few first-time MPP-ers in the form of Clive, Amy and John. Clive needs no introduction to most of us, but it’s the first time he’s bothered to come along to an MPP – it was good fun to have a wonderfully straight, down the line, talented puzzle solver among us. Amy was worried that she didn’t have any interesting puzzles to bring that we hadn’t seen, so she brought home baked cookies – WIN!  John had brought a bunch of puzzles – and some lock picking equipment to entertain us. Having seen them both deep in banter with the usual gang, I suspect that they’re going to fit in just fine with the other reprobates. 

One of our very own Two Brass Monkeys won a Jury 1^st Prize Award in the 2019 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition at IPP39 in Kanazawa – you may have read about that on a reputable blog somewhere. Unfortunately Ali wasn’t in Kanazawa at the time so the other Monkey was obliged to collect his trophy and pin… And that Monkey felt that a local ceremony was called for, and duly arranged for a suitable guest-of-honour-stand-in to hand over the trophy officially to Ali – there may have been a little more Nick-ness in Barnt Green than there had been in Kanazawa – at least if you squinted – but the trophy was presented to a somewhat taken aback Ali Morris for his 1^st Prize winning Hokey Cokey Lock. Congrats again on an awesome puzzle!

 

Ali did manage to recover his composure quite swiftly and promptly put his left arm in… who says puzzlers don’t have a serious side?!

Kevin has rather thoughtfully brought along a bunch of assembled Happiness cubes AGAIN, and Big-Steve and I can’t stop ourselves from trying to disassemble them and scrambling the pieces… except, this time the joke’s on us as between the two of us, we can barely manage to take one of them apart, let alone the entire handful. Thankfully there’s a helpful Welsh puzzler in the neighbourhood who isn’t as thick as the two of us and he manages to reduce the small pile of Happiness to a rather large pile of Happiness. (You’re welcome, mate!)

Somewhere in the middle of all that there was some lunch (pig roll for me as usual, Ed stepping back into the fray with a massive kebab) which took us away from the puzzles for about half an hour – not too long a break!

Big-Steve was dishing out copies of his exchange puzzle to all comers who didn’t already have a copy – and I suspect that someone ended up going home without one as my crate ended up with a pair of them and I’m pretty sure he only gave me one in Kanazawa. (Drop me a line if you’re missing one and I’ll wing it to you…) 

Clive arrived with a wheelie-bag full of Japanese puzzle boxes – much to Ed’s delight… on more than one occasion Clive had sought some advice from me on how to open a box and I’d directed him at Ed who’d duly opened every single one of them… some of them in the hall while he was with us, and the rest on the train home toward London that evening. 

Clive had also brought along a whole set of Osho’s co-ordinate motion trapped coins. Last time I’d seen Clive’s set had been at the Kanazawa Karakuri Museum where I showed him just how easily they flew apart when you spun them on the floor. Some of the folks at MPP hadn’t been in Kanazawa so I felt the need to demonstrate Osho’s lovely designs to them as well – Clive wasn’t around at the time so we left the pile of pieces for him to enjoy. [He spotted them a little later and it turned out he didn’t appreciate them in that state(!), so I ended up reassembling them for him – I didn’t want to be sued.] 

Just before six we hurriedly tidied up the hall and decamped up to my house where the traditional fish supper for thirteen took place around the dining room table – lucky nobody else came or we wouldn’t have been able to eat at the table! 

There was a lot more puzzling with people managing to find the odd puzzle they hadn’t yet conquered in one of the puzzle caves, or the several crates still to be sorted scattered around the house. (Sorry, honey. I will tidy them all up soon. Promise!) 

We had a debate about which train to put Ed and Clive onto – they didn’t want to rush their dinner (too much!) and only one of them had an open ticket… the other was going to miss his particular train and risk getting a fine. The resultant discussion around the dining room table was rather un-PC but an absolute scream. Ali took the boys down to the station and within minutes of them leaving I had received a text from Ed saying “Clive has been arrested.” In the end they managed to get home without incident. 

The lads started leaving somewhere around 21:30…. Although I think it was about midnight before the last person left… at which point I left Louis with some puzzles and I crashed! 

MPPiXL was another goodie… and the only question remaining is how will I mange to butcher the Roman numeral system for the next one?

Visible Burrs

('cos invisible ones are hard to photograph) 

The universe has a strange sense of timing…

A while ago I managed to snag a single item off Nick’s auction – a copy of Bill Cutler’s Visible Burr. It had been made by Brian Young as a Limited Edition back in 2005 when he produced 30 copies. 

Now it’s fair to say that I hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to the listed dimensions on the auction listing so I was a bit surprised when it arrived … it is large! And very Mr Puzzle-y – the woods instantly give Brian away, and the finishing at the end of the pieces should probably be a Mr P trademark by now… and if there was any doubt at all, he’s branded it with his logo.

Right, so said puzzle has been staring at me from atop my cabinet for a few months now as I haven’t had much time to play with puzzles recently… guilt growing by the day. 

…then a couple of weeks ago Eric Fuller announces a new set of puzzles available for sale, and one of them is none other than Cutler’s Visible Burr, and I can’t stop myself from ordering one, so soon enough I have a second copy mocking me while I’m not puzzling… this one’s disassembled as Eric was charging an assembly fee for this one (and having now played with them, I know why!). 

Seeing as how is was a long weekend I decided to give myself a day off to play with puzzles, so I ended up spending the best part of the day assembling and disassembling a pair of Visible burrs… and it was great!

Let’s start at the big end – Bill Cutler designed Visible Burr to be a disassembly challenge and deliberately made all of the notches in the sticks visible, even when it’s fully assembled – so by inspection, you should be able to deduce how to dismantle this 24-piece monster.  You effectively have a 12-piece burr trapped inside a 12-piece cage, so examination of the inner burr will show you which pieces can move where…

…and at this point you might notice something interesting – there’s a lot of sticks that can move at most points in the solution – only some of them are useful! You will find yourself wandering down a lot of blind alleyways if you don’t examine carefully and think a few moves ahead. (Or you can just play, experiment and fiddle around if you don’t mind going backwards and forwards a bit – which is my preferred approach!)

The first piece needs 7 moves to release it, with the next following along after another couple of moves. Release a few of the inner pieces and you’ll find you can start removing cage pieces too … and then carnage prevails as pieces start flying off left, right and centre. (I have a vivid imagination, stay with me!)

Keep on going and I have a large pile of large sticks. Yay. (What the hell did you do that for?!)

OK, now we pick up the smaller sticks form Eric and set about building that into the same sort of structure… now the three type of wood really help things, as does the fact that the frame pieces are all identical – which means the only real challenge is the 12 internal pieces – the rest is just about timing, timing and dexterity – did I mention you’re wrangling 24 pieces?

Now at this point, dear reader, I shall not insult either your intelligence or my imagination by suggesting that I put it back together unaided – I fired up my trusty copy of BurrTools and spent many pleasurable hours building a suitable model of the monster… so I now know that the complete model consists of 7868 voxels(!) – think about that before you chastise me for using software – that was a labour of love! 

BurrTools found a suitable solution in mere seconds, but it took a lot longer than that to actually build up a copy in the real world… oh and then there was the reassembly of the big bugger as well.

So I started the day with an assembled giant copy and a small set of sticks, halfway through my day I had a large pile of sticks and a small Visible Burr, and at the end of the day, I now have a reassembled monster on top of my cabinet looking down on my with grudging respect and a neat little copy in the cabinet on the Fuller shelf… a good day’s puzzling all round!