An early morning alarm
rouses me from blissful nothingness at the start of a weekend late in
October – this must be the sign that I’ve been waiting for: DCD weekend!
The traffic is light
(everyone’s still asleep!) and the queues are short at the airport so I
have plenty of time to pick up essential gifts for folks I’ll be seeing,
a long cup of coffee and a failed attempt
at picking up a new phone a bit cheaper in duty-free. (No, I can’t rock a
rose-gold phone… I want a black one… they don’t one have in stock). KLM and
Storm Brian make for a wonderfully exciting take-off and just over an
hour later I’m greeting Louis outside Schiphol
Arrivals. The trains behave and we get to Rob’s place just after
midday, as planned, where we find wee-Steve puzzling quietly at Rob’s
dining room table. Rob tops us up with caffeine and we pull out the
puzzles…
I’ve taken along an
evil packing puzzle by David Goodman which several people try over the
course of the weekend, and while Louis finds a (new to me) rather tight
solution, nobody manages to crack the “right
one” – as discovered by Ali at the last MPP. I also have a couple of
burrs that I need help with, and both of them end up getting solved over
the weekend, although we end up having a lot of fun with Lucida:
several people fiddled around with it before I took
a turn, and in the process of trying to take the pieces apart, I
mistakenly end up solving it. Realising my obvious error, Rob then
helps out by taking them apart again and for the next few hours we fail
at reassembly, until Louis eventually takes pity on
us and re-solves it… at which point I hide it in my rucksack lest Rob
“helps” me again.
During the course of
the afternoon Wil and Sveta, Taus and Isabel, Goetz and Frans arrive…
Rob keeps the snacks eternally topped up to keep puzzlers from flagging,
and the banter and merriment flow in equal proportions.
Somewhere around early
evening Rob orders a large pile of pizzas for dinner so we take pity on
him and help him out by polishing off most of them for him. We puzzle
for a bit more until folks start feeling the
need to check into the hotel and leave Rob in peace and quiet – knowing
he still has to prepare his slides for his traditional presentation at
DCD covering this year’s IPP exchange puzzles. (There’s apparently a bit
of a theme here as Taus hasn’t prepared
his slides either and manages to get them done in the early hours of
Sunday morning…)
Back at the hotel we
get checked in and head down to the bar, finding some random
Luxem-burgers and a few more German puzzlers, so we set up a table, grab
a few drinks and pull up a few puzzles to solve.
The stand-out
favourite puzzle that I’ve taken along for the weekend turns out to be a
lovely little wooden number from Takeyuki Endo. It’s basically four
nesting pieces with couple of constraints in the form
of dowels and grooves between a few of the pieces… everyone can
immediately see that the goal is to put the smallest piece into the
centre and close up the other pieces into a cube around it… except that a
few minutes proves this to be totally impossible.
Taus managed to solve it in a matter of minutes, Louis spent
considerably longer on it before he solved it, and everyone else (and
there were several challengers!) failed to solve it, with everyone
wanting to know where it came from (Torito) and how I’d managed
to get hold of it (because they won’t ship internationally)… it really
is a brilliant little puzzle that relies on one beautiful “A-Ha!”
moment… I predict that if a puzzle re-seller who shipped internationally
were to stock them (assuming Endo-san has any
more copies available) they would be an instant hit!
Somewhere around
midnight we fade for the night – and crash… I get a rather pleasant full
night’s sleep not having to get up at 3am to let the puppy out! A
combination of a rather dreich day, a late night and
not setting an alarm sees Louis and I wake up at 8am… which was when we
told wee-Steve we’d meet him for breakfast – Oops… we get down to
breakfast not much after eight.. ish…
We check out in time
to grab a lift to the hall with Goetz, register and enter the annual DCD
wonderland where the speed-cubers are frantically solving down one end
of the hall and the rest is given over to tables groaning under loads of puzzles their current owners are trying
to offload - it’s a sight I’ll never grow tired of.
Jack has hinted at
some of the wonders that he’ll have for sale a few days before in a post
on FaceBook and I’m keen to snag at least one item from him, so as he
starts setting out his stall I descend on him
and insist on giving him some cash… yet again I tell him his prices are
embarrassingly good – I’m sure he’d sell just as many puzzles at twice
the price… I grab a tiny copy of Coffin’s Cruiser and a monster copy of
Coffin’s cardboard burr in wood – very chuffed
with that one!
Much later on, when
people have begun to leave, I swing back via Jack’s table to pick up
some copies of his “Make a House” and Cruiser as gifts for puzzlers.
Michel has a wonderful
array of eBay finds for sale, including an incredibly well-preserved
Devil’s Knot, complete with a well-worn instruction sheet that he
reckons is probably more than 8 years old… I resist
the urge and later on he tells me that it found a delighted new owner.
Marcel has an enormous
variety of puzzles available and Hendrik seems to have brought a fair
chunk of the latest PuzzleShop.de stock for sale. I pick up a copy of
Siebenstein’s Bell puzzle – later described
quite accurately by Goetz as a poor man’s Panex – and a little cube
fidget spinner for a fiver. A little while later I accost Oliver (he of
twisty-sticker-fame) and ask if he has any stickers for the fidget
spinner – OF COURSE! And his partner duly sorts me
out with a set for next to nothing… at last a cube I can actually
scramble and solve with virtually no effort whatsoever!
As per normal I end up
spending an inordinate amount of time trawling through the piles of
crates on Wil’s table, finding some wonderful little treasures ranging
from a nice large Jan Sturm copy of the standard
handcuffs disentanglement puzzle through to some beautiful wooden
creations, including a Karakuri Rose that I’ve been looking out for for a
while.
NKC provides the usual
huge spread for lunch and after lunch Joop rounds us up for the
lectures… so we can see if Rob and Taus have finished their slides in
time – Spoiler: they have.
Taus presents a really
interesting mathematical (yes, really, those two words, together!)
analysis of a set of Polarium-style puzzles, introducing tools for
analysing different problems and then positing various
interesting questions on solvability and indeed proving some puzzles
have no solution. The audience got involved with suggestions and ideas
for further analysis.
Chris gave an amusing presentation on ambigrams
and other visual puns – he has great timing in
his presentation, letting the audience get there themselves rather than
taking their fun away from them. Rob ended things off with his annual
canter though the IPP37 exchange puzzles.
After the lectures we
caught the last few rounds of the cubing competition – great to see Mats
Valk in action – in between some last minute shopping for puzzles –
just in case we’d missed anything super-special!
When all was said and
done, the most challenging packing puzzle of the day commenced: getting
all the puzzles into the case before we headed out to the station… just
in time to catch the rain – which didn’t
manage to put a dampener on a terrific weekend… must try and do it
again next year.
Wayne Daniels genius was not only to find a way of nesting
them inside one another rather efficiently (that had been done a long time ago),
but also to fill up the remaining voids with pieces that were themselves either
Platonic Solids or would combine with other pieces to make Platonic Solids… 
I’ve always loved the concept, but I find myself really
marvelling at the craftsmanship that gives life to a thoroughly beautiful
object that contains the essence of Plato’s mathematical beauty within… 
