Friday – the Edward Hordern Puzzle Exchange

Will & Brian

A little history lesson for you: the puzzle exchange that is pretty central to IPPs these days was first introduced by Edward Hordern at the London IPP in 1989 – the story goes that he gave folks the alternative of bringing along a bunch of new puzzles (40) to exchange with everyone else, or pay a hefty entrance fee (£30!). Most folks chose the former and the rest is history.

Apprentices for the day...

These days first timers aren’t allowed to participate as exchangers, however they are allowed to assist someone who is, so I was absolutely delighted to have been invited to be Wil Strijbos’ assistant for the exchange. Not only would I get to see the puzzle exchange from the inside at the hands of a veteran, but Wil being Wil, I was also pretty much guaranteed a good time as well.

Chinny, Rob & Thomas

I got myself into the ballroom in plenty of time and managed to find Wil’s home base where I recognised  boxes full of his exchange puzzle from the sneak peak I’d been given a couple of weeks earlier. The only snag was the distinct lack of Wil. I wandered around the room in the hopes of tracking him down chatting to someone, but he was nowhere to be found. When the introductory speeches began, I started having visions of trying to pass myself off as Wil for the day (although anyone who’s met either one of us was unlikely to be fooled!). Just as the speeches ended, Wil sauntered in – ready for action.

Brian, Chris & Wil

Each exchanger has a list of everyone’s names and as the assistant (or bag man as someone put it!) it’s my job to make sure that Wil gets around to everyone and exchanges puzzles with them, hanging onto the puzzles received and keeping a handy supply of his puzzles ready to pass out.

We’d alternate between bouts of sitting at the table and letting folks come over to us and then wandering around and meeting folks at their tables.

Wil had strung together quite a story about his exchange puzzle which he presented firstly as the Solution Sheet(!) - a little card with the words “Solution” and “Exchange” on it and a picture of a bottle with a red rod sticking out of it, a ball bearing next to the bottle and a padlock securing the rod inside the bottle ... and yes, a pair of keys was provided, one helpfully already inserted into the padlock, the other attached to the top of the rod.

A yellow card with three challenges went along with the Solution Sheet and this explained the challenges as:

• First you need to understand the solution sheet – and he’d even helpfully explain this as follows: “Exchange” is Wil’s IPP32 Exchange puzzle, it is also the name of the puzzle as well as being the solution to the puzzle ... by now most folks were looking more puzzled than when they started – and I suspect that was the general intention!

• Second – Wil hands over a real little bottle except the ball bearing is in the bottom of the bottle this time and your challenge is to remove the ball bearing and put things into the state in the Solution Sheet. (See he wasn’t kidding! It was the solution, or at least the final state of the solution, just no clue as to how you might get there!)

• Third there was an extra challenge outside of the puzzle exchange, it was a gift from the assistant – at which point I handed over a single chain link to the exchangers as a gift from the assistant. (Remember that first-timers aren’t allowed to take part in the exchange, so this was a gift outside of the exchange from the apprentice.) The ceremonial hand over was generally accompanied by a suitable phrase (“No expense spared”, “It took me ages to make this”, “I’m new to this so I hope this is appropriate” or something suitably corny!) Wil would pause here and ask pointedly if they wanted the gift ... and some folks thought about refusing it, but most people decided not to hurt my feelings and keep the gift ... and then Wil would turn over the Solution Sheet to reveal the final challenge – the ball bearing is back inside the bottle and the chain link is secured around the shackle of the lock.

After the description of the puzzle, Wil would hand over a copy to the exchanger in the box that the bottles originally came in, showing them to be specimen bottles – which generally triggered another round of classic Strijbos remarks tailored to the particular audience (“Only been used once”, “It’s OK I shook it out” and “If you don’t like the puzzle it might be useful anyway!”).

I’m probably biased, but I think that Wil’s Exchange puzzle was an absolute cracker! It’s a classic Strijbos bottle puzzle, with a twist ... and all the additional obfuscation around the Solution Sheet at the beginning is terrific, especially when you realise what all that was really about once you’ve solved the puzzle.

Wil & Iwahiro

Wil has a real knack for entertaining folks and after the first couple of exchanges I got used to where the laughs were likely to come and made sure I had my camera ready –and managed to get some cracking pics of puzzlers having some serious belly-laughs at Wil’s presentation. A few folks made a meal of the chain link and insisted on posing for pics with the chain link as well – puzzlers are a good bunch.  A few of the exchangers even ended up giving me a copy of their exchange puzzles for no good reason – thanks!

Munkh-Itgelt, Laurie & Ethel

On the day there were 79 puzzle exchangers in the room, and we had to repeat that process about 60-odd times (allowing for a number of occasions when a mob would arrive more or less at the same time and they’d all watch one another’s explanations together) – the exchange was scheduled for 6 hours and that might sound like a really long time, but it literally flew by. Wil and I scarcely had time to wolf down our sandwiches at lunch time between visits from wandering puzzle exchangers and we were one of the last to complete the final puzzle exchanges as the organisers were trying to get the room set up for the lectures that were up next.

James & Wil

Jerry Slocum gave a talk on the history and development of IPPs over the years. From the first IPP that Jerry and Margot Slocum hosted in their own home, attracting 10 puzzlers from around the world, the International Puzzle Party has grown beyond recognition in some respects (this year there were about 400 delegates from around the world, with organised tours of the city and beyond for both puzzlers and their long-suffering partners, huge banquets, and a puzzle competition featuring 80 new designs) yet in other respects it’s still exactly the same – it’s about puzzlers from around the world getting together to share and talk about puzzles with old friends and new ones ... even though the numbers are so much higher, it still manages to be a personal event where you can spend time with people who share your passions – no mean feat!

Some pics don't need a caption

Wil & Nick

Jillian Hinchcliffe gave us an interesting insight into the work they have been doing at the Lilly Library on housing the Slocum Collection and some background on the library itself. The presentation included some photos from the pre-IPP trip that a number of folks had taken to visit the library, showing several well known puzzlers lying around on the floor trying to solve one of the puzzle desks commissioned for the collection. It was really wonderful to see how much effort has gone into ensuring that the collection is available to folks interested in the puzzles – with everything available for viewing either immediately or at a couple of hours notice for items stored in the archive. It looks like all  the effort that Jerry put into finding a suitable home for his collection has been worthwhile – the Lilly Library folks really seem to have embraced the collection and making it available wonderfully. Jillian also thanked everyone who'd already suggested improvements to some of the cataloguing data on the web site and asked everyone to keep submitting any corrections required.

Frans de Vreugd and Gary Foshee gave a brief canter through the development of the IPP souvenir books and the IPP Host gifts respectively – giving some of us newcomers a great insight into some of the finer details of IPPs that are seldom seen outside of the actual IPP. 

Thursday Evening – Founder’s Reception

During the first of the three evening functions, Jerry and the committee formally welcomed us all to the 32^nd Annual International Puzzle Party. During the speeches all of the first-timers were asked to raise their hands and it was a bit surprising when Wil Strijbos raised his hand next to us – just so that we didn’t feel singled out! Fat chance of that happening as there were piles of first-timers spread around the ballroom.

At that point there were yells of “Greenhorn, Greenhorn!” from somewhere behind us and Chinny arrived dishing out green Chinese finger traps to everyone with their hands up within striking distance ... and when he got to Wil he made a point of changing the chant to “NOT Greenhorn” and presented him with a purple finger trap.

We hung out with the Boschs and Neil and Jen for a while as various people came over to introduce themselves, chat for a bit and welcome us to our first IPP ... James was right!

Peter slipped into entertainer mode when he realised that Michelle hadn't seen his magical mini-bar key and he soon had her thoroughly flummoxed and highly entertained - much to everyone's amusement! 

I found myself chatting to Marcel Gillen about whether or not we’d be seeing him at the Dutch Cube Day again this year (“Of Course!”) and ended up talking about how one might be able to get hold of one of his original chess pieces – at which point he remarked that he happened to know someone in the room (remember that this is about 400 of the world’s best designers, manufacturers and collectors of mechanical puzzles – and me – so this probably isn’t quite as strange as it might first appear!) had a spare copy of one of them, at which point he marched me over and introduced me to a collector who’d recently acquired one of them only to find that he already had one, so Marcel suggested that the two of us should talk ... (we did, and hopefully at some future point some cash and a puzzle will change hands – at which point it will no doubt feature in this blog). 

Goetz Schwandtner came over with Rob Stegmann in tow – knowing that Goetz was a bit of a Kugellager-junkie, Rob had brought an old version of the puzzle in a round format with four tracks along for Goetz to play with, and knowing I was also interested, Goetz had brought it over to show me as well. The two sheet metal parts (the crown and the spider) are rotated while the rivet shaped pins are allowed to move in and out along the tracks – very Kugellager-ish and significantly older! Goetz gave it to me with 1 pin out and the other 3 in at the start and said it had taken him quite a while to get it there and then encouraged me to have a go ... which I duly did, but I couldn’t tell you whether I was going forwards or backwards and I fear I gave it back to him in a far more jumbled state. Later that evening I ran into the two of them in the design competition room where Goetz managed to finish the puzzle and I got some neat pics of the puzzle fully disassembled.

A short while later Goetz grabbed me and said that Jerry McFarland wanted to meet me and took me across the room and introduced me to Jerry – I’d been planning to seek Jerry out at some point as I’d left the UK with strict instructions from Bruce to pass on his best regards – so I did just that.

It was lovely to meet Jerry face-to-face after all the emails we've traded over the past year or two on a couple of his recent projects, including one that turned into his design competition entry this year. Jerry had an iPad with him and showed us a really impressive video of his home-brewed CNC rig for cutting burr pieces – it’s pretty amazing to watch it in action and Jerry admitted that he got almost as much pleasure from putting the rig together than he does from using it to make new puzzles.

Next thing Jerry called Bill Cutler over to introduce me to him and I ended up chatting with Bill about his designs and how I’d been at James’ place when he decided he needed to take out all of his Cutlers to make sure they were all properly identified and catalogued ... and it made a pretty big pile of burrs!

I realised I’d left Gill alone for quite a while so wandered back in her direction (turned out she was in fact quite happily chatting to Jen & Michelle and hadn't actually noticed how long I'd been gone!). We ended up chatting with Simon Bexfield for a while before the entire Dalgety-clan came over to make sure that we were having fun.

A bit later Brian Young strode purposefully over and presented me with a bunch of little puzzles, including an Aussie version of the historic leprechaun puzzle, a Puzzleman Australia bead puzzle and a set of what looks a bit like Stewart Coffin’s Logs and Sticks, except there are too few logs and too few sticks - so it's probably something else entirely!

When things began winding down a bit Wil invited me up to his room to show me a couple of puzzles and asked me to show him my solution to his First Box – he demonstrated his solution and after a bit of a hitch I showed him how I was solving mine. We decided that they were both equally effective on the current version of the box, although I’d already found that my approach wasn’t all that successful on James’ copy of the original First Box – advantage Strijbos! While we were chatting about the First Boxes, Wil gave me a new cylinder for my First Box with a smiley face on one end and a sad face on the other ... so you start out with the sad face peeking out through the hole in the bottom of the box and have to release the smiley face – cute! He also gave me replacements for all the other MPP crowd that I’d be seeing in a couple of weeks time as well...

Wil had brought a copy of Flemin’ across for me to have a look at along with a 2-Drawer Karakuri box (Yes, I took them both) – didn’t get Flemin’ open, but opening the 2-Drawer box put a huge smile on my face – that one has a huge dose of humour in it!

While I was in Wil’s room I noticed a familiar-looking ribbed blue cylinder that looked remarkably like AlCyl on the table and asked about it – Wil pointed down to one of his trademark plastic crates that was literally half-full of them ... life’s weird, I’d seen pics of them years ago and spotted one listed on Eureka but it was sold before I got anywhere near it, and literally haven’t seen one since then, until my mate Chris managed to buy one privately quite recently and I was allowed to have a go on it – loved it and decided I ought to try and find one for myself... and here’s Wil with a crate of them! So I got one for myself and another for Nigel since he’d asked me to keep an eye out for anything that I thought he might like.

Somewhere past midnight I crawled back into bed again... at sometime the jet lag is going to get me!

IPP Thursday afternoon

Gill and I spent the morning wandering around some of the monuments in DC on our own, having navigated the Metro into the centre of town (not an especially tough puzzle, to be fair) – we watched aircraft wheeling into Reagan and banking across the Jefferson Memorial while tourists pedalled boats on the river. Weaved our way between sprinklers dodging the spray through the parking lot, thinking more than once that it might be rather pleasant to wander into the spray for just a bit, then noticed a young girl doing exactly that. A few minutes later a large white van drove past us and stopped at the corner for two huge guys to get out and go and stand in the middle of the spray, arms outstretched cooling down – perhaps it wasn’t just us tourists from England who were feeling the heat that morning.

We sat on the lawn at the Washington memorial (in the shade!) and took some pics before heading up toward the White House for yet more touristy pics. From there we wandered across to a cafe for an iced coffee and some a/c – not sure which one went down better! After a short wander through the shops, we took the Metro back to Pentagon City where we found a Johnny Rockets (long story, but we like the milkshakes and burgers) so decided we’d have to come back there again...

Back at the hotel I got distracted by Pavel Curtis introducing some of his word games to Bram Cohen and a small group of puzzlers so I stopped and joined the puzzling – really enjoyed the multi-layer combination of a physical puzzle and several layers of word-puzzles and some serious lateral thinking – all of them gave some really good A-HA moments a few times through the solution process.  Not sure how far we’d have got without Pavel’s expert gentle guidance from the sidelines when we got stuck though.

During the afternoon I met the amazing force of nature called Stephen Chin (or more commonly Chinny or Chinnomoto) and Matt Dawson who gave me a lovely box of chocolates (the state’s finest!) as a thank you for connecting him to some folks back in the UK who were interested in getting hold of a copy of his exchange puzzle – heck that was easy – and I got a box of chocolates for my “trouble”.  I met Derek and Michelle Bosch and got introduced to little Ann who was doing her impression of the best behaved toddler in the world at the time! I congratulated Derek on opening his Revomaze Gold during the past week and we chatted a bit about it as a puzzle, or not... and "recent developments".

I met Ken Irvine, another first-time IPP-er who was generally around with his rucksack full of new designs – always happy to take them out for folks to play with. They turned out to be a huge hit and I’m sure that Ken got sick and tired of telling folks that he didn’t have any for sale, he’d just brought one of each of his designs for folks to play with ... although as I write this, Tom Lensch and Eric Fuller have already committed to producing some of Ken’s designs and Bernhard Schweitzer has also been making promising noises along the same lines, so hopefully they’ll be available in due course – the designs I had a crack at were all excellent ... one of them has all the feel and play of one of Mine’s cubes, except it doesn’t have the little tricky bit to it ... making it more of an honest puzzle, but just as much fun to play with!

The puzzle design room sucked me back in again and I had a wonderful time playing with some of the designs, again. This time with a little more success!

Peter Wiltshire’s Ferris’ Box is a truly excellent puzzle box – it looks like a 3*3*3 cube inside a maple frame and none of the usual tricks seems to do anything, but when things do start to move, boy are they interesting! It was a really fun box to solve and a real treat to play with – Peter’s crafting skills are superb and it’s not hard to see why it won the Jury First Prize ... Peter made a limited number of them and most of them will be in the Apothecary Chest project ... a few of which might be sold off once the project is complete. I suspect he must have gotten sick and tired of the repeated requests for one of his boxes because he’s subsequently decided to make a further four copies, in different woods to set them apart from the first limited edition run and sell them via one of the puzzle auctions ... keep an eye out for that one, it’s a cracker!

I made absolutely no progress on the Packman puzzle (again!) but did manage to solve Double Symmetry (the three orange triangle puzzle) which sort of surprised me as I am usually rubbish at that sort of puzzle (making symmetrical shapes from weird pieces). This puzzle gives you three odd triangles and asks you to make a pair of symmetrical shapes...

At one point I found myself puzzling next to Brian Young so introduced myself and we ended up chatting about life, the universe and puzzle blogs. 

Neither of us was convinced that his linking to my blog posts had actually done much for his sales, but at least I was able to name a couple of folks who’d bought an Opening Bat after seeing mine and hearing about it. While we were talking about his Opening Bat he told me about one of his serious collectors who’d sent him an email just after he’d received his copy saying “Is that it?”. Brian suggested he reserve judgement until he’d at least tried playing with it first, and several days later there was another email along saying “Ah, now I understand...” – Brian wouldn’t say how long it subsequently took him to get through all three locks properly.  It was great chatting to Brian and really felt that we came at life from a similar perspective – perhaps it’s a Southern-Hemisphere-approach-to-life-thing?

Eric Fuller and Robert Yarger whirled through the design room and the registration desk in a bit of a flurry – one had mailed his gear for the evening do along with his puzzles and the other had been delayed, and they were sharing a room ... all ended well, with the two of them making the do in the evening with plenty of time to spare ...more on which in the next post ...

IPP 32 – the beginning

OK – it might be a bit after the fact (Gill and I spent a week in NYC after IPP, hence the dearth of blog posts over the past few weeks, except for the ones I teed up before I left) , but here we go – the newbie’s take on IPP32:

WOW!

That is all.

Anything else that I say about it now is not going to do it justice. Trust me.

In fact that was one of the conversations that Neil and I had toward the end of IPP: How the heck do we write about this and convey the shear awesomeness of it all? And we both concluded that you couldn’t, so best not to try...

So what you are going to get from me are some stories and descriptions of some of the events from my point of view ... as usual they’re going to be personal stories and they’ll give you a flavour of what IPP32 was like, but if you’re looking for the blow-by-blow description, sorry, I have a day-job (and a wife and two dogs who haven’t seen me for a while!).

...OK so let’s start at the top – Gill and I took a flight out of Heathrow into Dulles and it was pretty uneventful – uneventful flights are good flights! Walked off the plane into a wall of heat and humidity – realised how much we’d missed the simple things in life... sunshine!

Cab to the hotel was deliciously cool and after checking in and recognising a couple of name tags on the way up to the room to unpack, we wandered down to the IPP registration desk. I walked up to the desk and said “Hi I’m Allard Walker” and I was met with a wall of smiles, introductions and hands to shake – Brett Kuehner made it his job to introduce me to everyone around at the time (most of whom seemed to be related to him – turns out he’d roped pretty much his whole family in to help out!) and sort me out with the registration pack, name tags for Gill and I, we had our photos taken, collected the IPP t-shirts I’d ordered and had a quick lesson in the badge puzzle (more later, promise!) before we wandered back up to the room to dump the shirts and the welcome pack and headed back down to the bar area (for some reason the bar / lobby always seems to be the hub at these events!).  Our badges had a green background for our delegate numbers which marked us out as first timers and that little detail proved to be a great conversation starter over the next few days...

Down at the bar I recognised a face from one of our MPP meetings (Richard Gain) and recognised a voice from a set of video reviews – caught his eye and introduced myself to Neil Hutchison – The Juggler.  Wil joined us a while later and started telling us a sob-story about being stopped by German customs who then took his Peppermint Stick puzzle apart so he asked me if I’d mind reassembling it for him – it would probably be rude to refuse, so I sat down and tried, only it wouldn’t quite go together properly, until eventually I looked up and asked Wil if this was actually a Peppermint Twist or just a matched pair of twisted wires – they didn’t seem to want to bite together ... and about the same time I noticed Wil being even more conspiratorial than usual and smelled a rat ... at which point he gave me the fifth piece of what I’d assumed was a four piece puzzle – after all my copy is! It went together pretty sweetly after that, much to everyone’s amusement!

We chatted for a while and then, having established that most folks had already had dinner, we took up residence in the bar proper with a couple of puzzlers off the Renegades forum and I took out a couple of puzzles for folks to play with.

While the blokes began talking and playing with puzzles, the girls struck up a conversation and before long Jen (Neil’s partner), Lesley (Peter Wiltshire’s wife) and Gill (my far better half) had realised that they had lots more in common than being puzzle-widows – they shared a bunch of hobbies and interests (it seems that puzzlers’ wives are a pretty crafty bunch!) and a serious passion for shopping!

I’d taken my copy of Louis’ A-Maze-Ing box along for the ride, pretty sure that not many people had seen one (!) – before long Peter Wiltshire had passed the box onto Jim Strayer who proceeded to open it ... 

Peter rather kindly gave me a great little cube that he'd made and it kept me occupied for quite a while, with Neil peering over my shoulder and saying not-very-helpful things - all puzzlers are alike it seems! 

Peter had worked his way through my copy of Wil’s Washer Cylinder with a little bit of encouragement from Neil and I in between a bunch of friendly puzzle-banter ... hard to believe I’d only just met these guys.  

Mine’s Little Twister had come along as well, and although it didn’t come out quite as often as the A-Maze-Ing box, it remained undefeated during the entire IPP.

Neil had brought along a few copies of Derek Bosch’s Hex Stairs puzzle that he’d made for the puzzle party and had brought a couple down for me to choose one from the different woods he’d made them in, along with a tiny copy he’d been experimenting with. I began fiddling with the tiny one after a little encouragement from Neil, only to find that I couldn’t get it back together again – the tolerances are so fine that unless you had everything perfectly aligned, it will not go back together again – so Neil helped me out with that one. Having chosen one of the larger ones to buy, we played with that, with Jim Strayer giving us all a good laugh a few minutes later with his “Gosh, that sucker’ll come right apart on you!” while he was fiddling with a copy.

While we were sitting chatting, I recognised Rox from the photos on her blog as she wandered over to say hello, to me ... and then she spotted a pile of twisty puzzles and she was off again.

A couple of times over the course of the IPP I found myself using the same description, I felt like I’d found my tribe, my clan – they were just like me, shared my interests and didn’t think it was weird to enjoy being puzzled and collecting puzzling things.

A bit later most of the girls had wandered back up to their rooms and one of the committee came over and announced that the design competition room was opened – clearing the room of pretty much all of the puzzlers instantaneously ... except for me – I’m a bit slow ... I eventually caught up with the rest of them in a room full of new puzzles waiting to be explored ... this really is like being in puzzle heaven – the very best  new puzzles crafted by the best craftsmen out there, all neatly laid out for anyone to have a go at.

A bunch of us were spread out around the room puzzling, mostly in silence, but every now and then there would be a salvo of banter at someone’s expense and a round of laughter before the puzzling continued. I’d come across Simon Nightingale in the puzzle room and said hello and settled down to a cute little bowler hat assembly puzzle that I later discovered was from Kohfuh – and I was quite chuffed that I’d managed to solve it reasonably quickly, especially after Simon’s warnings on how hard it was likely to be – I must have got a little lucky as there was a neat little bit of misdirection in the shape of the pieces...

I also had a go at Jane Kostick’s  Chamfered cube – and managed to get the assembly together fairly neatly – I really enjoy playing with her puzzles, they have a nice satisfying feel when the magnets grab and they slot together neatly. She’d entered a few separate puzzles in this year’s competition and they were definitely more puzzle-y than her entry from last year.

Being a bit of a puzzle box junkie I had a brief bash at The Vault, realised that the tool was a flash-light (Hey, it was more than some folks managed – several of whom were spinning it and whacking it on the table, although nobody blew on it while I was around) but didn’t really get much further than that.

I crashed at about midnight, which given I was still on UK-time made it about 6am already ... and slept like a log until 3am...

...and that was my first day at IPP – not bad given that we only got into DC after 7pm...

IPP 32

...just got home after IPP32 and a few days in NYC - still need to unpack properly - blog posts will follow, promise!

The aftermath:

A toast to Akio Kamei

Kamei has been producing great puzzles and inspiring a new generation of puzzle craftsmen for some time now. 

His latest version of the Whiskey Bottle puzzle box was created in 2008 in walnut. The earlier version from 1983 had been crafted in a much lighter wood and the new version is described as being essentially the same as the earlier version except that the mechanism has been improved and should be more robust … so now you know!

I’ve always thought of this as one of the classic Kamei designs, so when I saw a copy come up for sale, I dived in and a short while later the bottle had travelled from Brussels to Barnt Green and I was happily puzzling.

This puzzle shares a common theme with a couple of other designs where there’s a pretty obvious “secret” compartment that you’ll be forced to find rather quickly – in this case the mere act of picking the bottle up (in a certain way, admittedly!) gives you access to the first compartment – a little drawer inside the top part of the bottle… 

What’s not so obvious is the presence of a second (really!) secret compartment and that’s the real puzzle. That compartment is rather neatly hidden and requires a few moves in order to open it up properly – one or two of them are a little unusual – they won’t slow down an avid puzzler, but they will certainly mislead the casual metagrobologist into thinking they’d completed the task and totally miss out on the real puzzle.

I think this one’s a classic – it looks great among the other puzzles and it stands out rather nicely due to it’s size. It certainly looks the part and it’s good to have one in the hoard!

…more Coolen Creations

1st prototypes

With any luck, when this post is published, I’ll be enjoying the delights of the 32nd International Puzzle Party. Somehow I managed to blag myself an invite in spite of a pathetically small hoard of puzzles and only really having been a slightly serious hoarder for the past three years or so. (Yip, I still can’t bring myself to refer to what I do as collecting or to myself as a collector.)

The IPP is an amazing opportunity to meet puzzlers from around the world, chat to world-renowned collectors, designers and craftsmen about the things they love and share stories about puzzles and puzzling … and I’m sure I’ll be boring you senseless with stories from IPP for a while to come, but in the mean time, here’s the story behind my IPP gift…

...all the prototypes

As a newbie at IPP I thought that it might improve my chances of being liked and accepted (and more importantly, being invited back!) if I took along some little puzzling gift-type-things – you know, bribes! However, as I’m not a designer or a craftsman of any note (any note!), I  was always going to rely on getting something made by someone with far more talent than I have. And given that the target audience here are the world’s greatest collectors, designers and crafters of puzzles, you can’t exactly pick something up off the shelf and make a good impression – so I set about trying to come up with something unusual. 

Final candidates

My first attempt was getting some jigsaw coins cut with some suitable letters cut out of them (IPP 32) – but unfortunately my emails went unanswered so that one didn’t progress any further than an initial enquiry.

My next attempt was foiled when the gent I was hoping could produce something unique for me ended up getting horribly over-stretched at work and totally unable to take on anything extra.

With a couple of weeks to go before IPP, my puzzling mate Louis goes off on holiday with his family and a couple of decks of cards, as you do. Louis had read my blog post on impossible card-folding and decided to have a bit of a bash himself while he was on holiday. Before long he was sending pictures of his work to a couple of us in emails and he’d produced some pretty impressive stuff, so I asked him if he might be interested in producing something for me to dish out at IPP.

He dived in enthusiastically and over the course of the next few evenings produced a couple of alternative designs that he’d email over and we’d discuss, and then a day or two later, some improved designs would arrive until about a week later – and having destroyed at least an entire suit, we’d more or less decided on the features to include and Louis went into fine-tuning mode.

He went out and bought a bunch of different types of playing cards so that he could experiment with designs on the different types of cards and it soon became apparent that not all decks of cards are created equal – and the one I’d thought most suitable turned out to be an absolute pig to work with, so it was dispatched to the junk pile.

We eventually settled on a standard blue-backed Bicycle poker deck and Louis sprang into action setting up a manufacturing process that roped in Mieke with Laura keen to help out as well …

In an attempt to work out how long the postage from Eindhoven to Barnt Green would take, Louis sent over a test package of the design candidates and there was a little bit of nervousness while we waited for the envelope to wander across the channel – and I have to admit that from time to time I had visions of them not getting here in time for me to take them along… but in the end, they got here in just less than a week, which meant that the real ones should all get here in time … even still, we split them into three separate shipments to reduce the risk of them all not making it.

...in case you were wondering...

I did the easy bit once Louis (and Mieke!) had produced all the cards, and printed little frames to mount them on and bagged them all up ready to take along to IPP… cunningly adding a QR code inside the frame that points at this blog post – just in case anyone hasn’t read my blog yet!

I think that Louis has done a pretty awesome job on these – I think the design is clever and really shows off a couple of interesting little “features” to get the brain working a little – it’s one of those things you can glance at and totally miss some of the subtleties- so I’ve tried to highlight a couple of them in the close-up pics …

I reckon they are going to go down rather well at IPP …Thanks Louis! Awesome job, mate!

The business end.