DCD 2012 aka MPP8

Just over a year ago Nigel and I flew across to The Netherlands to attend the 2011 Dutch Cube Day in Eindhoven. Luckily our fellow MPP-er Louis lives in Eindhoven and he took care of us while we were over there ... afterwards I blogged about it a bit and we talked about it to all and sundry at subsequent MPPs ... and it seems that folks liked what they heard. This time Nigel and I were joined for an early Saturday morning flight from Birmingham by Chris, and Ali and Oli flew across to Amsterdam from Luton. We all met up with Louis who’d caught the train from Eindhoven to Schipol and then the six of us made our way across to The Hague, scene of this year’s DCD. 

We all managed to check-in when we got there, although there were a couple of fraught minutes until the hotel found Ali’s booking in the name of Mr Alistair instead of the more orthodox use of his surname. When the hotel restaurant opened at 11:30 we all piled in for some lunch as most of us had been at the airport from 4:30 that morning. While we were happily munching away Wil Strijbos pulled up in his red van and hopped out with Christiaan Eggermont. They joined us for a bite to eat after they’d checked in and then headed off to the venue to unpack Wil’s wares for the Sunday. 

We walked round there after lunch and notionally helped Wil unpack his crates in order to justify our presence. Bernhard Schweitzer had obviously been there for a while already as most of his stuff was already unpacked. It was great to see Bernhard again after a bit more than a year at the previous DCD. I spotted Joop doing his rounds as one of the organisers and reminding the prospective sellers that they were supposed to be saving their trading for the next day – although I did notice a couple of my mates coming out of there with little parcels or treasure in spite of Joop’s best endeavours. 

Rob's well-laid dining table

Mid-afternoon we all headed off toward Rob Hegge’s place for a bit of a puzzle party. We’d spoken about DCD in Washington and I’d mentioned there would be a bunch of us MPP-ers coming over so he’d offered to organise a bit of a get-together. We arrived with Wil and Christiaan in tow to Rob, Frans de Vreugd and Simon Nightingale all furiously puzzling away, and a little while later Rik van Grol and the rest of the gang arrived. (Only half of us could fit in the red van so the others took a cab from the hotel.) 

Rob had laid his dining room table with all of his IPP puzzles and about half of us promptly sat down (after we’d said hello to everyone, promise!) and began confusing ourselves. The rest scattered themselves around his lounge peering into the many cabinets jam-packed with puzzles. Rob was a great host keeping us plied with caffeine and fruit juice and the odd round of snacks. He happily sought out some of the less well known puzzles in his collection and hauled them out for folks to have a go on ... Nigel for one was glad to be able to give one of Brian Young’s big Telephone Boxes a bit of a once over. Not sure anyone opened the (Karakuri) Grand Piano though...

I spent a while trying my hand at Tan-Talizing and failed miserably, only to see Louis solve it in a matter of minutes, take his customary photo of the solved puzzle and then break it up while I tried not to watch... although I have to say that he did a very good job of obscuring anything useful in the process. 

At one point Rob brought out his Roger Shaker and Ali had a pretty good go at it, actually solving it! Locking it up again proved a bit tougher and we had to drag Wil in to try and salvage the position... and even though Wil was seen prancing around the room performing all manner of strange callisthenics, the puzzle remained resolutely open ... sorry Rob.

We had to drag ourselves away from Rob’s treasure trove to meet Bernhard back at the hotel for some Italian and just managed to get back in time to find him, and after dumping our gear, we all (11 of us!) set off following Bernhard to an Italian joint he remembered from previous visits ... after a couple of false starts and wrong turns we found it and they pushed a few tables together for us. I knew the food was going to be superb when Bernhard didn’t hesitate and ordered his standard Carpaccio and a main course (read last year’s story if that doesn’t make sense!). Several courses of superb food duly followed, liberally interspersed with some (apparently) very fine wine ... with several puzzles floating around the table among the courses. As always the banter was highly entertaining and when Louis noticed that the wall tiles looked a bit like the panels on a puzzle box, he proceeded to try and solve the wall! (And he was stone cold sober at the time, promise!) It was an outstanding meal with fantastic company ... and if you’re ever in Voorburg, you could do a lot worse than look up Fratelli's for a bite to eat! (You’re on your own on the company though...) 

Back at the hotel, we found ourselves drawn to the bar area for yet more puzzling and I eventually stumbled up to my bed just before midnight...

Next morning Louis and I headed back to the venue a little after the opening time and the rest of the gang followed along at a more leisurely pace having sussed out Wil and Bernhard’s tables the previous afternoon. 

Anyone seen Vinco?

This year DCD was held in Sint Maartenscollege in the school hall, with tables set up for the speed-cubers down one side and puzzle tables taking up pretty much the rest of the hall... and clearly a lot of new folks had arrived between us leaving there on Saturday and getting back on Sunday – there were stacks of new puzzle tables piled high with interesting puzzles, optical illusions and games. 

We signed in and each received a micro three-piece cube puzzle courtesy of Richard Gain (the microcubologist) and the organisers – a really nice touch!

Inside the room it was wonderful recognising puzzlers from DCD last year and from Washington earlier this year – every one of them stopped to say hi and ask how we’d been in the interim – good people... 

Wil had brought a couple of things along for me, including a Five Nails puzzle from Jan Sturm for my Shropshire puzzle mate Dale, and a couple of Cola Bottles (#5 and #7B) to add to my collection – but I’ll be writing about those in due course...

Jack Krijnen had a table selling some of his designs (you’re not likely to come across Burrly Sane available for sale like that...) and had a few placed out for folks to play around with ... including a very simple looking 2D puzzle consisting of about 5 pieces and the object is to make the classic outline of a house... WAY tougher than it looks and I’m still kicking myself for not taking a copy...

Ceremonial handover

My main reason to looking out for Jack was linked to our meeting at DCD last year. Just before that he’d published a couple of pics on a forum of a tiny burr set he’d crafted for himself, and in the interim he’d decided to make a few more copies for sale, and I’d managed to get in early enough to secure a copy and I was going to be picking it up at DCD ... it really deserves an entire post on it’s own, and that’s what it’ll get – but for now I’ll just say that it is even better in the flesh than it looks in the pics and it is an awesome piece of woodwork! [Thanks Jack!] 

We spent pretty much the whole day wandering between the tables and noticing new things each time we went past a table ... the lunch that the organisers laid on was great and the Midlands Mob spent a while munching and talking puzzles with Simon and Frans while giving our legs a bit of a break...

After lunch we had a couple of lectures – firstly from Frans de Vreugd on his puzzle-hunting trip to Sri Lanka with Peter Hajek. Frans entertained us with some great stories and interesting insights, all illustrated with a terrific set of photos from the trip and a bunch of carved objects all of which had secret compartments hidden inside them. As most of us hadn’t been exposed to any puzzle boxes from Sri Lanka, it made for a really interesting talk. He was followed by Edo Timmermans who gave an inspiring talk on modelling mathematical constructions using simple little magnetic balls – the sort we’ve all played around with at some point... except that his creations were on an EPIC scale – take a look at his YouTube channel and I guarantee that you’ll be thoroughly amazed at what can be done with these simple little ‘toys’ in the right hands.

Fidgety Rabbits (the white things they're holding!)

After that I spent a while chatting with Goetz Schwandtner who’d brought along a couple of really fascinating derivatives of the standard Chinese rings ... the first was a copy of the Fidgety Rabbits puzzle from this year’s Design Competition – it’s a binary implementation with 7 sliders, each of which can be in one of two states... then he brought out a special version by the same creator (Namick Salakhov) which had a ternary implementation, with just 6 sliders! He passed it around and everyone had a fiddle around with it and we all went a little way into the sequence and then allowed discretion to take over and reversed back to the start position... the binary one was opened a few times but nobody really tried to go all the way through the ternary example. Goetz spent a while talking us through the design which is rather ingenious as it will generalise to any higher order implementation desired – clever design that! [There’s a much better pic of the two next to each other on Goetz’ web page.] 

One of the other things Goetz had brought along was a Lego (genius!) implementation of a Bob Hearn design that had never been made before – even though it theoretically only has three rings, the number of moves involved was simply astronomical! In fact Goetz hadn’t even determined the number of moves required to fully solve it – jolly creative that Goetz bloke! :-) 

The Dutch Cube Day really is a tremendous opportunity to meet some amazing puzzlers, manufacturers, sellers and designers... 

Where else could you get one of Oskar’s designs autographed by the man himself (yip, I did!), or where could you tell Robrecht Louage how much you enjoyed 4 Steps Visible Lock, or chat to Vinco, or talk to Marcel Gillen about his old puzzles and his more recent designs, play with some really exotic twisty puzzles and rake through crate after crate after crate of wonderful goodies from Wil Strijbos. It’s a wonderful opportunity for all of the above, and you get to make some excellent new friends ... all for the princely sum of ten Euros for the day! You cannot beat that for puzzling value for money! If you haven’t already joined NKC, drop Rik a line and sign up and then join us in Holland next year ... if you love puzzles you won’t regret it!

Obligatory loot shot.

Yet more puzzling-generosity

Over the past year quite a few folks have presented me with various bits and bobs and I’ve commented on some of them in past blog entries already, but there are a bunch that I haven’t already mentioned and I really would like to – so here’s my way of saying thanks: 
 

A couple of months ago I had an email from Jane Kostick to say that they’d sent a few of their bronze stars across to an English magazine for a photo shoot and when they were due to be returned she’d requested that they be redirected to me. A few days later I received the package. Jane refused to accept anything for any of the stars and asked me to accept them as thanks for saying some nice things about her work – so I got a 14” bronze six-axis star for my collection – the picture above shows my previous sixteen axis star nestling in the arms of this new monster ... Thanks Jane and John Kostick.

Wil Strijbos has a habit of tossing little extras into my orders every now and then. One of the really cute extras was a copy of “Der Mond” (or “The Moon”) – it’s a little tray puzzle in the shape of a crescent moon, but the pieces are cut in such a way that they can also be used to form a cross – which is pretty cool as in the one shape all of the outside edges are curved and in the other, they’re all straight – quite clever ... it’s one of those sort of dissections that you imagine has been around for ages and I expected to find it in Hoffmann’s, but didn’t ... Thanks Wil.

Ages ago Nigel was showing me a copy of his Pentangle Vertigo burr – if memory serves we were in the coffee shop at my office – I’d got one or two pieces out and decided to stop there as the shapes were a little unusual and I didn’t want to embarrass myself totally among all my colleagues. A while later he presented me with a copy, because he knew I still didn’t have one and he thought I’d enjoy it ... nice bloke, eh? Cheers mate.

Out of the blue I get a package in the post – and (believe it or not!) I wasn’t actually expecting anything at the time – opening the package there’s a copy of Laurie Brokenshire’s exchange puzzle from IPP31 called Bi-CycLe and a short note from my puzzling mate Ali as a small token of appreciation for hosting MPPs and such – rather kind of him I thought, and it is a cracking little Vinco puzzle. You start out with a pair of ungainly identical bits, each consisting of a sort  of L-shape protruding through a triangle, and you’re told to make a stable solid with 5 planes of symmetry – with no idea of what that shape might look like ... spending some time with them and experimenting produces a rather amazing little A-HA! moment when the pieces interlock properly and produce a very regular, stable object with the required symmetrical planes – a lovely little surprise! Thanks Ali!

When we visited James Dalgety’s puzzle museum, James gave each of us one of his recent IPP Exchange Puzzles and I was lucky enough to get a copy of Mind the Gap, his exchange puzzle from 2008. 

Mind the Gap was a Stewart Coffin design that he didn’t seem to think much of, in fact James recalls him dismissing it with the phrase “It’s just a load of junk!” – actually IMHO it’s a rather neat little puzzle. It consists of a 3*3*3 (sort-of) cube – except that it has waves along two axes – giving you a darn confusing puzzle – you have 9 L-shaped pieces to make up this cube and the only instruction is that there shouldn’t be any internal voids - hence the name, geddit? You’ll soon realise that the angles in the different axes aren’t quite the same – and that results in a nice challenge – I think it’s anything but a load of junk, but who am I to disagree with arguably one of the greatest puzzle designers ever?

A while back I obtained a couple of monster burrs that came via a slightly circuitous route from the guys who were in the process of setting up a web shop selling (of all things) fine wooden puzzles – particularly unusual and higher order burrs. The web shop is now up and running successfully as Arteludes (crank up Google translate if your French is as rubbish as mine!) and carries some rather unusual burrs –many (if not all) of them handmade by Maurice Vigouroux – and I’ve already told you that I think his work is smashing! Anyhow, those nice folks tossed in a 6-wood copy of their little Diagonal Star for no apparent reason – thanks Guillaume!

I’ve mentioned my mate Louis from Eindhoven a few times already on this blog. Now Louis has an uncanny knack for finding puzzle bargains on eBay, but every now and then his knack comes up against an unwillingness to ship anywhere outside of the UK, and when that happens, he sometimes gets things shipped to my place and then either picks them up on his next visit or I post them over. In the last batch of puzzles there was a Magna Cube, which should have struck me as odd because there’s already one in Louis’ puzzle cabinet back home, so when he arrived on his last visit, he promptly gave it to me as a thank you for putting him up for the weekend – as he knew I didn’t have one and thought I’d like one – what a gent! Magna Cube is a fairly simple looking 3*3*3 cube consisting of 8 pieces – three of them are made up of 4 cubies and then there are five elbow-shaped 3-cubies, except, as you might expect from the name, each piece has magnets strategically placed around them so that there is only one correct assembly that has all of the magnets attracting one another so that the cube can stand supported by a corner on its stand. (This one took me far longer than it should have for such a relatively simple puzzle...)

Last weekend I went down to London to attend Peter Hajek’s end-of-year puzzle party, or EPP (don’t worry, I’ll be writing about that in due course!) and a couple of folks insisted on giving me more puzzles. The first of them was Wil Strijbos who was in town visiting Peter and attending the EPP. Wil was furiously apologetic because he’d put a Christmas gift into the packages he’d sent to a couple of my puzzling mates when we all placed our most recent round of orders, but he’d forgotten to put one in mine, so here was something to make up for that – instead of a canary in a cage, he presented me with an Owl in a Cage. I guess this should be classed as a simple hedgehog puzzle, but I swear that the cage seems smaller and the bird seems larger than the others I’ve seen – great example of the genre and some nice detailing on the bird – thanks Wil! [Wil also gave me another gift – a Prague Special Edition – but I’m intending to write about that one on it’s own ... you’ll see why...]

Tim Rowett (he of Grand Illusions fame) was wandering around dishing out all manner of Christmas fare including some humorous postcards, copies of his latest catalogue and free puzzles including a copy of the Elusive E puzzle and Four times Four Equals Twenty – a design by one James Dalgety. I’ve already written at length about the entertainment that the Elusive E has provided us in the past so I won’t bore you with all that again, but the other puzzle is a great little poser! You’re provided with four triangles in four different colours and instructed to build a stable icosahedron and you’re helpfully even given a picture of one – there are two challenges, with the second involving a colour matching challenge thrown in for good measure ... of course it’s not just going to be a simple construction challenge, and you’ve hopefully already worked out why that is...

When I got home from London the next morning there was a parcel on the doorstep from another of my puzzling friends, Bruce ... he’d recently received an order from Bernhard Schweitzer and he’d bought a couple of copies of Willem van der Poel’s IPP24 Exchange Puzzle, The Grandfather of 6*6*6, one of which he’d sent to me as a gift. Willem van der Poel had designed the first 6*6*6 burr back in 1954 in his head and then used this exchange puzzle as a means of celebrating its 50^th anniversary and telling a bit of the story behind it. As burrs go, it’s small – but nicely made and rather historical – thanks Bruce, I love it!

Also in that box was a copy of Ronald Kint-Bruynseels’ packing puzzle called Gregory Pack as a gift from Bernhard himself. I’d spotted this series of very cleverly named packing puzzles on Ishino’s site a while back. [Some of the others are Al Packino, Lauren Packall, Kim Nopack, Pack Nicholson and Sam Packinpah.] Gregory Pack consists of a box with two 2 cubie obstructions and 12 angled 5-cubie pieces, 10 of which are left-handed and the other 2 are right-handed. Seems simple enough, but I can vouch for the fact that it’s a pretty serious challenge ... even getting the pieces out of the box is non-trivial, in fact the first time I tried to unpack it, I wrongly assumed that some of the pieces had swollen and that was what was stopping them from coming out – actually it was just the combination of the shapes and those odd little protrusions getting in the way but it took me a while to realise that ... really interesting packing puzzle that looks like it should be a lot simpler than it really is – disarmingly simple pieces and not many obstructions... but! Thanks Bernhard, and Get well soon!

Puzzlers really are a great bunch, who are not only generous in giving but  also go out of their way to offer support, time and encouragement. So, to my fellow metagrobologists - my sincere thanks for your generosity and kindness.
Here's to another fun puzzling year...