Virtual MPP 4

With the world still either firmly in the grips of a global pandemic or beginning to emerge from one, depending on where you currently find yourself, there was zero chance of holding a physical meet-up, so last weekend we hosted our fourth Virtual Midlands Puzzle Party – an opportunity for friends from around the world to have a chat about puzzles and enjoy a few hours together.

Some elements of the established routine for VMPPs remained – we still had three two-hour sessions over the course of the day to allow folks from around the world to join in for at least some of the day without having to get up in the middle of the night – but we decided to flip the program around a bit so that folks who weren’t able to join the evening session could be subjected to enjoy our infamous Pu(b)zzle quiz and the evening folks could have some gentle chit-chat about puzzles they’re currently enjoying.

We kicked off the first session at 10am and it didn’t take long for us to have about 25 puzzlers from around the world – including a few from the US and Canada – in spite of the fact that it was quite literally stupid o’clock over there. Tyler, Robert and Ken were surprisingly spritely given that most mortals are fast asleep at 4 or 5 in the morning!

First order of the day was a guided tour of Michel’s new puzzle cave. Having recently moved into his new home (across the street from the old one) he's been able to set up a dedicated puzzle cave and was keen to show us around. The tour started out front with a view of his old house and the massive trek of probably 20 metres he’d undertaken to move house – and a quick peek at the pentomino house number designed by George and printed by Oskar. A quick stop in the living room showed Michel’s favoured puzzling spot, complete with several partially solved puzzles, before heading off into the puzzle cave itself.

Michel gave us a nicely-paced tour of his various puzzle cabinets and sets of map drawers showing how various bits of his collection are organised either according to designer (there’s a BIG selection of Oskar’s in there) or type (similarly, Michel’s clearly a massive fan of n-ary puzzles – he has four copies of the Hexadecimal puzzle) or maker (there’s a serious collection of Thinkfun puzzles!).

One thing that caught my eye was a number of cast concrete puzzles (cubes, burrs and assembly puzzles) by Albert Meijer that looked really striking – Michel says the pieces might be a bit brittle so best played with carefully, but they look really unusual.

After the tour and the inevitable Q&A we saw the return of Frank’s ever-popular (well that’s what Frank says) Pu(b)zzle quiz – this time with even more puzzle puzzles, including an anagram round that brought us the delights of BILE CUTTLER and TOMBOY SWANKERS and a maze round that had us doing mental arithmetic badly along the way… and in the end seeing our resident maths teacher Mike taking the laurels.

After the quiz Tomas treated us to an impromptu tour of his shop and a bit of a chat about how a small town in Finland can support one of the only dedicated puzzle shops in the world. (Spoiler: the internet helps a bit.) There were comments about the seemingly unobtainable copies of things like Popplocks just sitting there on his shelves waiting for a puzzler to take them off his hands… and then he brought out some classic Strijbos puzzles that have been selling for silly money in auctions over the past few years all currently in stock at Sloyd.fi.

The morning session ended with what looked like Ali’s house on fire – except it wasn’t – he was barbecuing for the handful of puzzlers that had gathered – well-distanced – in his back yard to enjoy our VMPP together… I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was highly jealous of the lads’ BBQ!

The afternoon session started with some chatter about the pandemic and vaccines, with Pantazis telling us of an as-yet undocumented side effect of the vaccine: he’d developed a liking for physics! Pantazis also did a fabulous job of generating interest in visiting Kastellerizo, offering his services as the island’s only official guide in case the lure of visiting one of the few puzzle museums in the world wasn’t enough. There was a bit of chat around 3D printing and that’s probably identified a need for a future session on different perspectives in 3D printing puzzles – which seems to be getter ever more accessible.

Jane Kostick was the main attraction for the afternoon session. She started with a talk on the relationships between John’s stars and her various wooden designs – showing how each is effectively a model of the other, even though they look totally different. Jane has a wonderful knack of making the geometry of the different designs all make perfect sense and I love the way she can explain the relationships between them and actually show you how each relates to the other.

She spent a while showing us how the stars are assembled from individual wires in a wooden jig – showing us all of the different symmetries along the way and describing the different jigs she uses. She made it all sound wonderfully straight-forward but if my experience of trying to assemble them in her living room a few years ago was anything to go by, that level of expertise comes from a lot of practice!

After the theory, she took us down into the basement to show us how she cuts the wires for the stars and then gave us a live demonstration of solderwelding the ends of the stars – definitely the most dangerous demo we’ve ever had at an MPP – Jane wrestling with an oxy-acetylene torch while chatting to us on a precariously perched iPhone with just a pair of sunglasses for protection. (Thankfully no iPhones or craftsmen were harmed in the making of that video!)

After the solderwelding demo, she showed us a bit of the finishing process for the stars, starting with a barrel of wonderfully dangerous looking (there’s definitely a theme here! :-) ) acid. Then there was a bit of multi-stage polishing before the final product is packaged up ready for shipping around the world.

From there Jane took us into her workshop out back and talked us through her process from big boards down to little sticks, including whipping up a quick perfectly dimensioned stick with several jigs along the way to get the angles and lengths exactly as she wants them. There’s a huge collection of jigs on a shelf set up to do a couple of things each, very precisely. Something I found interesting was the fact that Jane also uses some of the Byrnes Model Machines for a number of the stages in her process – something she shares with Brian Menold.

There was a demo of the press fitting of the magnets she uses and a bit of a chat about the need for microscopically different drill sizes depending on the type of wood she’s fitting the magnets into in order to get a strong enough grip without splitting the wood in the process. There’s clearly a lot of experience going on in there…

During the walk around the woodshop Jane was keen to point out the wood from friends’ trees and from her own yard that she’s been curing so that she can incorporate it in a future project – making something beautiful out of something special.

I really enjoyed seeing Jane talking so animatedly about the classes she runs for kindergarten children to teach them about some of the more interesting shapes she uses in her designs, getting them to make up moulds with magnetic assemblies and the fill them with plasticene to see what the internal shapes are.

The evening session was literally just a couple of hours for us to chat about puzzles and puzzling. Everyone took a turn to tell us what they’d been puzzling on recently and anything that they particularly recommended. I got a fair amount of stick over the fact that I’d made zero progress on Jack’s Tippernary Mystery Tour. Meanwhile Goetz was raving about it…

Tyler didn’t have any new puzzles to tell us about, but was quite excited at the prospect of having just ordered a couple of Byrnes Model Machines so there should be a steady supply of new puzzles in his future once he gets those dialled in nicely.

Marc admitted to being stuck on Space Case, but wasn’t ready to accept any assistance yet so he just received a bit of sympathy. Tamsin was enjoying Blinded II and Louis was keen to sing the praises of Akaki’s baskets. Frank proudly announced that he’d managed to return Geneva back to a pile of separated pieces – something he’d been struggling to do over the past few weeks – we’d been “encouraging” him on our weekly games night chats.

Haym couldn’t say enough good things about Chiral 2+2 – one that I need to spend some more time on – I cannot come close to seeing how the heck I can weedle a fourth piece into that frame…. Ali also admitted to really enjoying both Akaki’s Baskets and getting to grips with a recent print of Stewart Coffin’s Slot Machine – another cracking puzzle. Michael showed us some early results of his experimentation with Altekruse pieces – I like the fact that he’s doing his experimenting in the real world rather than in BurrTools – proper old school analysis.

Toward the end of the session we had a bit of a philosophical discussion about our VMPPs and their future – I mused that we’ve been on a bit of a journey since the first one when we tried to cram as much puzzling into the three sessions as we could, and then over the next few we almost stepped back from that a bit, and it seems that folks still enjoy them just as much – and selfishly there’s a lot less pressure on the organisers to find stuff to fill the sessions – it seems that puzzlers really appreciate the opportunity just to hang out with their friends and chat… and while in the UK we might be starting to imagine that we might be able to come fully out of lockdown around the middle of the year, there might still be a place for these VMPPs from time to time – it seems there’s still a bit of a demand for them so we’ll need to make a plan for something more permanent I suspect.

A massive thank you to Michel, Frank, Tomas, Jane who helped make this a brilliant day with our puzzling mates. 

For anyone who wants to see recordings of the sessions, they're available on Youtube over here: 

Morning session              Afternoon session               Evening session

Puzzlers being generous, again...

[Today’s blog post comes from a very hot St Petersburg...]

It feels like ages ago since I visited Wil Strijbos for his last-in-a-while-Queens Day Party, and I still have a few thank-you’s to say... so here goes:

 

Thanks Michel for the mini-Stressful – having made a few larger ones, I can only imagine how fiddly these little guys must have been to make ... and at least I didn’t have any of them actually break in half on me(!). It’s sitting next to the bigger, clumsier ones that I made a little while back...

Thanks to Wil not just for a wonderful day’s puzzling and a fabulous Chinese meal afterwards, but also for the three little laser cut interlocking assemblies... two of them come with a picture of the target shape (both dodecahedrons, if memory serves) and the last one asks you to make something beautiful with the pieces...!

The green one (“clover”) goes together fairly easily and the pink one (“cherry blossom”) is a bit trickier as the overhanging edges are a lot larger and tend to get in the way and confuse things a bit more... I thought I’d finished that one and on inspection found that quite a few of the joints hadn’t actually been properly put together ... lovely little assembly challenge – particularly for us ham-fisted types!

 

The third one consists of 10 yellow triangles, and as I discovered after a while experimenting with various forms, the cuts aren’t all made equal (if you stack the other two sets of pieces in any orientation, the cuts always line up...with these ones, you need to rotate them to get them all to line up....) – OK so having noticed that, further exploration was a bit more fruitful and I realised that I could do something interesting with about half of the pieces ... and then added the second half in a similar vein, et voila – it’s beautiful ... and a little surprising!  Thanks Wil

 

Going back a little further even, I owe Tomas Linden a huge THANK YOU for all the extra goodies he included in my last order...

There was a large extra white box in with my last order and that turned out to be protecting a really neat wooden display case with a glass lid perfectly sized to fit three Hanayama Cast Puzzle boxes... inside there was a whole heap of extra puzzling goodies.

The first thing I noticed was a serious collector’s piece – an old Columbus Egg tangram puzzle, complete with its original packaging and challenge booklet ... I suspect that has just become the oldest puzzle in my collection – and it’s still in great nick.

There was also a fairly non-descript puzzle box that I recognised as one that Oli had brought to one of our very first MPP gatherings at my place a couple of years ago ... I think it’s an Alan Boardman design that it deliciously simple, yet thoroughly bamboozling if your haven’t seen it before – it fooled me for ages when I first saw it so I’m really chuffed to have one of my own now to inflict on the unwary ... rattling around inside it was a Tantrix key ring ... as I’d just ordered a set of the Tantrix Match puzzle sets in that order... (and I’ve been working my way through those on this cruise).

There were a couple of interesting little plastic baggies – one with a sticker on it saying “Take your lady on a movie night” – and inside there were six little flick-books each with its own fun little animation ...

The second little baggie had stacks of little odd-shaped pieces of curly birch (?) ... and the label explains this to be “Allard Walker’s personal FIX KIT for Symmetrick | Sloyd (c) 2013” – after the hard time I gave Tomas about how hard Symmetrick was as a puzzle, and how long I spent trying to build three dimensional solutions to it (in my defence, he has form there!) he’s given me a set of extra pieces to enable me to build just about any shape I’d care to build – now even I should be able to make something symmetrical flat on the table! Love it!

Thanks Tomas – not only a lovely surprise, but some wonderful puzzles to add to the collection – thanks for helping me fill up that new cabinet I added to the cave.

Symmetrick

Tomas Lindén’s IPP32 exchange was a devilish little puzzle designed by Vesa Timonen. Consisting of only two flat pieces of wood, the goal is to make a single, symmetric shape... Tomas kindly gave me a copy of his exchange puzzle and it has taunted me for the last few months – it is evil! Be warned!!

 

I had a quick bash at it while I was at IPP, and got nowhere...

Then I tried it while I was on holiday in NYC, and got nowhere...

Back at home, I put it on the vast shelf-of-puzzles-to-be-solved, and every now and then I’d take it down and fiddle around with it, and get nowhere...

During MPP7 several folks played around with it, and solved it, and I gave it another bash, and got nowhere... 

(Let me know if you aren’t sure where this one’s heading!)

OK, how hard can it be? You have two flat pieces that are virtually identical, and you’re told that they both need to be flat on the table and you have to make a symmetric shape.

At one point on my journey with this puzzle I found myself trading emails with Tomas, and making sure that he really meant both pieces literally flat on the table (yip!) and that it wasn’t some sneaky answer that relied on negative space (nope!) – this time (!) it really was a straight forward solution (hard to picture given this was the same guy that bought us the Black or White!)

Straight-forward it might be – simple it is not!

At one point I resorted to a feeble attempt at using some arithmetic, and measured the edges and played around with various sums and differences, trying to work out which bits needed to be combined or aligned to result in symmetric remainders ... and failed miserably. 

Some helpful soul mentioned that he’d eventually found the solution and then realised that he’d seen that shape a few times before, and not recognised the symmetry in the shape – GREAT! Now I know I’m going to kick myself when I eventually find the solution!

Months later, I found myself out and about having dinner with a bunch of puzzlers in The Hague, and this puzzle’s been doing the rounds and I’m literally the only one left who hasn’t solved it yet, so they give it to me and I try (yet) again! 

AND I GET NOWHERE!

...and eventually one of them takes pity on me and shows me the answer, and my first reaction is “That’s NOT symmetrical!” – only it IS ... but until you ‘see’ it, you’ll be convinced it isn’t, and merrily move on to the next experiment.

For me, this has to be one of the best little bits of puzzling value for money (even if I HAD paid for it!) around at the moment ... I’ve heard stories of one or two gifted puzzlers finding the solution in mere seconds, but most folks take a decent amount of time to work it out ... and some of us took forever! 

Be warned – it is evil. But if you really do want one, I'm sure Tomas will sell you one over here...