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

 

A Puzzling Visitor

A while back I had an email from Rox asking how far I was from Warwick, and after a brief geography lesson (Rox, we hold MPPs in Warwick, it’s half an hour from my place!!!!) we established that she was coming to Warwick for a conference and might have a couple of days spare for some puzzling so I offered to put her up at my place either side of the conference and we’d have a braai and invite all the (reasonably) local puzzlers I knew around…

Now Rox is a veritable force of nature - easily an eleven on the Beaufort Scale. She blew into town last Wednesday evening and I collected her from the airport after a full day’s travelling from the Finnish hinterland. She’d done buses, trains and planes and had set out disgustingly early in the morning to get across to Birmingham, so when she arrived I got a huge hug as I think she was pretty glad to have finally arrived at her next base.

Gill sorted us out with some dinner and we all caught up before Rox and I headed up to the cave for some relaxed puzzling. Rox would root through the cabinets, find something interesting and then settle down on the floor to play and take photographs. We called it a night mercifully early as she’d had an exhausting day and I had to go to work the next morning and appear vaguely intelligible. (It’s a new thing I’m trying!)

While I was at work, the plan was for Gill and Rox to head out for some shopping as Rox needed a pair of smart shoes for a dinner and she hadn’t had enough space to pack a pair because she’d pretty much filled up her luggage with puzzles. Gill managed to drag her away from the puzzles eventually and by all accounts the shoe-shopping was successful, although during the course of the day I did get a series of pics on my phone of Gill puzzling and Rox in Gill’s craft room on the sewing machine… I suspect that Rox’s trip to the dark-side was short-lived because the next time I saw her, she wasn’t asking about sewing machines and all the talk was about puzzles again…

 

After the day with Gill, Rox went off to her conference in Warwick for a few days and I collected her on the Sunday morning for an unofficial MPP gathering-cum-braai at my place.

The guys all arrived at about 11 in the morning and after the initial introductions there was a whole lot o’ puzzling going on…

Chris had brought along a Rubik’s cube that needed its centres aligned (there’s text on most of the sides and some of them weren’t properly aligned even through the cube was solved). Although I used that as an excuse to bring down my Mindcuber – I knew it wouldn’t be able to line up the centres. While my little robot crunched and ground its way through a couple of cubes that were either too small or too stiff, Steve sat quietly playing with Chris’ cube until he’d sorted it all out and was able to give Chris his cube back with all the text properly aligned … thus dodging any potential OCD disasters.

Steve had printed a couple of copies of Stewart Coffin’s Fourth Dimension (Coffin #94) for us to play with. Steve’s been looking through Stewart Coffin’s designs to find ones that haven’t been made in large quantities because they’re particularly hard to make accurately (in Ap-Art, Coffin noted that he’d made four copies ) – and then throwing them at his 3D printers so that the puzzling world can enjoy them. He gave me a copy and challenged me to find the two symmetric assemblies and then gave Rox a special copy because he knew she would be pressed for space in her luggage – it was jumbo-sized!

Rox made sure that everyone had a bash at pulling David apart and rebuilding him and played with her Many Horses – although I have to admit that I never quite managed to make a horse that passed muster properly – all of my attempts had something rather significantly wrong with them… in spite of having 104 real solutions! I’m just not very good at puzzling!

I (partially) burnt some meat around lunchtime and everyone did their bit to try and reduce the pile of food we had produced – the braai seemed to go down quite well, although the enjoyment of the meat might have constrained the participation in the homemade cheesecake afterwards … which meant there were a few slices left for me during the week!

More puzzling followed lunch and I was rather grateful for Ali managing to manhandle a rather tight Bishop open (no comments, please!) although the new Rook remained firmly locked all day.

Several folks spent a while playing with the new (to me!) Waterfall Box and while they all enjoyed playing with the puzzle, it remained firmly locked up … Ali probably came closest although at one point when he thought he was making good progress he realised a little too late that he’d been going in the wrong direction and had the box right back at the start position. 

Louise had us in stitches after she successfully, albeit rather unconventionally, solved Wil's Dita Perrier bottle, assembled it rather hurriedly and then suffered a malfunction of sorts that saw the bullet in bits and a crystal penis roaming around inside the bottle... now if you know this particular puzzle, you'll know that spells Trouble (yip, with a capital "T"!). True puzzler that she is, she managed to extract everything, legally, no less, and then reassembled it properly.

Russ and Adin spent a while twiddling purple Revomazes and there was a little bit of discussion about the first of the R2 Revomazes, which didn’t seem to have found much favour among the MPP-crowd who’ve partaken in them. I spotted an opportunity and harangued Russ into taking away my unopened (literally still sealed in bags!) Titanium and Handmade (v2) Revomazes and solving them for me. After my experiences with the first Handmade Revo, I can’t bring myself to invest time in solving the next one and the Ti…I know I’m only hurting myself…

 

Some of the guys left around 6-ish and we ended up serving another round of braai to the folks who stayed behind… significantly reducing the pile of leftovers to manageable proportions. Yet more puzzling ensued…until the last bunch left at around 10 o’clock. Long day… FUN DAY… but a long day.

We all crashed pretty soon after that (Rox was after all operating on about an hours sleep from the night before) and then in a large reversal of roles, I found myself sending Gill off to work while I had the day off to make sure that I got Rox to the airport on time.

Rox and I trawled through a few more puzzles in the cabinets – notably Peter Hajek’s “What Now?” box: it was great fun watching Rox talk herself through her options along the way before committing and then solving the box. Rox took stacks of pictures of the cabinets and all the individual puzzles that pulled out… judging from the number of pics that she’s subsequently posted on FaceBook, she’s taken more pictures of my puzzles recently than I have!

I managed to get her safely to the airport and heading away on the next leg of her European trip before going home for a wee rest.

It was great having Rox around, fun spending time puzzling with her and excellent to be able to introduce her to some of my puzzling mates over here. Thanks for coming to stay, Rox and thanks a stack for all the pressies you brought over for Gill and I. 

[For another point of view, have a look at Rox's version of events over here!]