Hidden Mazes

I bring you a wonderful juxtaposition: two puzzles I’ve recently added to the collection – one a gift from a friend and the other purchased from a craftsman back in the old country… both are essentially “just” hidden mazes – yet they couldn’t be more different!

Die Doolhof – literally “The Maze” in Afrikaans - is a stunning piece of craftmanship in some wonderfully figured wood – so wonderfully figured in fact, that it has lost some particularly knotty bits and Johan has had to fill them with a clear resin to maintain the structural integrity of the wood.

The central core has a “simple” (as in: no tricks – not as in trivial) maze routed into the hardwood and the outer cover houses a pin that needs to traverse the maze… Johan’s added a couple of dummy pins to the outer piece just to help throw you off the scent a little – keeping you a little off-balance while you try and imagine what’s happening on the inside.

At the very start of the maze there aren’t too many different paths to explore, so you can get a little traction and feel that you’re making progress… once you’re well and truly into the maze, it’s really easy to get yourself disorientated and turned around, heading back toward the beginning once more with realising that you’re going in the wrong direction…

Persevere and reach the end and you’re rewarded with the core coming totally out of the outer shell to reveal a neat little packing puzzle that Johan’s placed right inside the core – cute touch! 

I really enjoyed watching the occasional pictures and videos that Johan posted while he was making these beauties – the core started out as a hexagonal core with the maze CNC routed onto the six sides in turn… before being put in a lathe and turned rather gingerly into a cylinder… sometime with less success than others as the chisel catches the edge of the routed maze and effectively trashes all of the earlier work on that core…technique duly perfected, Johan produced a bunch of them and sold them via his website back in August last year. 

Stunning craftsmanship with some drop-dead gorgeous wood. 

Amazebox couldn’t be more different, in spite of the fact that it too is a hidden maze puzzle. 

Engineered and printed by Stefan from Bulgaria, I first saw this at MPP XXX when Stefan flew over to spend the weekend puzzling with us. He’d brought along a copy of his Amazebox, a puzzle he’d designed for some friends who run an Escape Room in Bulgaria. Several folks had a bash at it and one or two managed to make progress on it… I tried, and failed spectacularly, so I was delighted when a few weeks after his visit, a personalised copy arrived in the post from Stefan. 

As luck would have it I didn’t have a lot of time to play with it until after Peter’s EPP where I’d seen that Louis had rated it as one of his three puzzle finds of 2017… this puzzle clearly has a lot more than originally meets the eye! 

I duly settled down and had a proper fiddle around and kept finding myself getting trapped in the first quarter of the puzzle… persevering I manged to make it into the next section and stumbled across something really intriguing: there’s a little winder in the cover that allows the puzzlist to view the tiniest possible piece of the maze as you make progress – not nearly enough to be instructive as far as getting a view on the maze itself – but all of a sardine I was seeing red and green flashes through that window… and then things began to change… and I was well and truly hooked on this puzzle!

I hunkered down and bashed my way through the rest of the maze and finally managed to get the Amazebox open – and my respect for Stefan’s engineering expertise went through the roof! This guy has used a standard home 3D printer to produce a professional quality puzzle, building in some very interesting features that make the maze rather interesting (and not simple, in the puzzlingly interesting sense of the word here!) and even enable the puzzle to be reset right back to the start instantaneously – genius! 

All the while leaving a massive internal cavity that could hold your secrets (or another puzzle) hostage…. The design is really clever, and the execution is superb! Thank you, Stefan, – it’s brilliant!

...crickets… tumbleweed… more crickets…

From this...

I’m a little ashamed that I haven’t been putting much up on the blog lately, but I have been rather busy… in fact up until a couple of days ago, pretty much all of my spare time had been soaked up in the puzzle cave – moving stuff around and adding cabinets, but let’s start at the beginning. 

...to this...

I was running out of space in the puzzle cave – most of the puzzles were actually in the cabinets, but you couldn’t see most of them as they were stacked three or four deep, and often on top of one another… it got that bad, that Gill and I actually had THE TALK about converting the garage or adding a second storey on top of the garage for a bigger puzzle room… in the end, common sense prevailed and we decided we just needed to make better use of the rooms we had -we didn’t REALLY need two permanent guest bedrooms – and there’s only two of us in the house so we should be able to cope… but that did kick off the mother of all re-jigs with new Ikea wardrobes in Gill’s dressing room, moving the desk out of the cave – which will henceforth be a purely puzzle cave, and then add a bunch of cabinets into said puzzle cave… 

...and this.

Except, simple as that sounds, it’s never going to be quite that easy… first we sorted out Gill’s dressing room and moved the spare beds in there… then the desk got disassembled, moved next door into the little spare room and reassembled – which left a bunch of spare wall space in the puzzle cave, so the new cabinets went in there, then I transferred six cabinets worth of puzzles from old to new cabinets, leaving them empty so I could dismantle them and put the white backing in them that I’d tried (and rather liked!) on the other half of the original cabinets… 

That was painful: taking down a perfectly good cabinet, stripping out the lighting, removing the back and covering it in white vinyl and then replacing the backing, the lighting, getting them back in place and then putting all the shelves back in and replacing the doors… 

…and then I got to spread the puzzles out a bit, so that you can actually see them on the shelves again… and I like the result… 

There’s still a bit more tidying up to be done, some need a bit more rearranging, but there should be some space for growth for a while now… he says…

I promise that I will also start writing about actual puzzles again shortly!  

MPP XXXi

Short version – it were good!

Longer version – it was really fun and Kevin discovered he had TWO hands – freakish or WHAT?!

Walker-length version: it was the weirdest start to an MPP yet! I had no-one staying over so I drove down to the hall on my own – in itself a strange feeling – and when I got there Angela and Peter had already laid out their stall and Oli (who’d been dumped there by his young son and wife on their way to Cadbury World) had pretty much set up all the tables already, saving me a major job… 

I got the tea and coffee sorted while Wee-Steve arrived, followed shortly by Big-Steve, Ali and Michael – we have a quorum – the games can begin! I unpacked some puzzles, grabbed a coffee and started raking through Angela’s stash of books… I’d cleaned her out of signed Martin Gardner first editions last time around, but still managed to add another first edition of his columns to the collection… along with a Philosopher’s Stone / Omee the Orb. 

A few first-timers joined us: John D had been threatening to come along for most of last year but things always seemed to conspire against him coming so it was great to have him join us. Richard S found us on FaceBook and decided against his better judgement to go along and meet the strangers he’d found on the internet… he seemed to have fun discovering lots of new puzzles, getting hints on some puzzles that had been taunting him for a while and even chatting magic and history with John D… funny how the two of them had to travel more than an hour west to bump into one another when they’re actually from the same town! 

Big-Steve had brought along a million-or-so tongue depressors. 

Oli had brought along a great new disentanglement puzzle he’d found in Etsy – made of a modified spanner with some holes in it, it combined a couple of traditional disentanglements to form a decent challenge in a wonderfully robust format – nobody is every going to damage that thing, unless of course they cut the nylon rope… must look that shop up. 

Speaking of disentanglements, Kevin had brought along some of his latest Chinese finds that were SO TOUGH we found it almost impossible to engage in our normal game of “mess-up-the-disentanglement-because-Kevin-loves-to-solve-them-again”! We did however manage to have a little fun with the square copy of Pieces of Eight that he brought along, assembling it with just one of the spacer pieces on the outside and a neat little gap between two adjacent pieces… who knew? A puzzler with OCD who couldn’t leave it wrongly assembled … :-)

I tortured Ali with my Japanese wood joint burr again after he didn’t assemble it for me at the last MPP… he tried for a few more hours (!) during the course of the day, and the evening, but it sadly remained in five too many pieces… he did solve a serious number of other puzzles in between, I should add, lest he not agree to try and put it together for me again in the future. 

I managed to pick up a couple of old puzzles from Tim T and even to arrange some long-distance puzzle shopping to secure a puzzle for James that he didn’t have (!) even though he hadn’t been able to join us for the day. (The process in case you’re interested involved taking pics of Tim’s tables, emailing them to James and then spending a little while on the phone answering questions about various things before he spotted one that he thought he didn’t have, so a deal was struck. Now I just need to get it to him before he realises he already has three of them! :-)) 

Kevin had brought along his copy of Carsten's Pirate's Casket and several folks made approving noises while solving it at MPP... I hadn't had a chance to solve it so Kevin kindly told me to take it home and play with it and tell him what I thought... so I did. [It’s a very clever puzzle! Some brilliant use of magnets in unusual configurations and a very nice 3D printed box… a few really nice, testing lock mechanisms with just enough feedback to allow you to deduce what’s going on and what you need to do to defeat them…LOVELY!]

Jamie had joined us after a long break from MPPs (guessing he’s just about got over the trauma of the last one – that or working night shifts plays havoc with attending -day-time- puzzle parties). He brought along a huge number of locks and lock picks and ended up giving some budding burglars (I’m KIDDING! He’s an anaesthetist!) lessons and chatting picks and picking with Oli… pity Shane wasn’t there – suspect he’d have loved to join in with that. (Damned lurgy, in case you’re wondering.) 

Steve’s tongue depressors (I wasn’t just going to leave that paragraph dangling there – just checking if you’re actually paying attention, gentle reader) got assembled into various lengths of stick bombs… Cue Steve sitting there for ages weaving sticks together and gently working his way down a long line of tables until he’s had enough… cue videoing and plenty of laughs as the beast is released, and then repeat the entire process again a little while later… and then when we’re packing up, find as many places to hide the damn sticks in others’ boxes because his better half has warned him not to bring them home again – there’s a rumour that he bought an industrial quantity of them for peanuts from his favourite internet sales-site. I found a couple of hundred of them when I was unpacking my boxes the next morning…

Meme-of-the-day was Kevin earnestly describing an assembly process holding up one hand and saying “I can’t do it I need another hand” – to which Jamie remarks “Kevin, you’ve got TWO hands” – cue all manner of attempts at humour: “OMG, there’s two of them! Imagine what this would mean for surgery!” – “AARRGGHH where the hell did that come from??” while looking at TWO hands… we’re a cruel bunch. He did join in the laughter and general silliness that followed so it probably hasn’t scarred him for life!

At some point during the afternoon I pulled out one of the Kosmos Escape Room games and asked if anyone wanted to play it…and soon enough Big-Steve, Oli, Kevin and I were working our way through The Pharaoh’s Curse – under the watchful eye for Louis, who’d already played the Dutch version back at home with the family… turned out everyone enjoyed it and a couple of days later I was getting slagged off on FaceBook by Oli for his having had to go out and buy a copy of every single other game they make…

Frank had brought a Kumiki fish-elephant for Gill which he duly presented to her back at our place after things had been suitably wound up. Most folks ended up at chez Walker for the traditional fish supper where some more puzzling, some chatting and a lot of fun rounded out a fantastic MPP.