V MPP V

We held our fifth virtual Midlands Puzzle Party last weekend and got to spend time with our puzzling friends from around the world – I really like the way we’ve been able to meet up with old friends around the world and make some new puzzling friends even though there are all sorts of restrictions on travel and actually getting together in the real world. For some of us these virtual gatherings really have been a bit of a silver lining – so thanks to everyone who’s been coming along for the chat and especially to those who’ve been contributing!

This time around we decided to flip the schedule around a little so that we could subject our afternoon audience to one of Frank’s quizzes. (Why shouldn’t they have to suffer like the other sessions have?!) So we had some general puzzle chat in the morning session, Frank’s latest quiz and some impromptu puzzle identification in the afternoon session, and then the evening session was given over to an update from George and Roxanne on the world’s biggest puzzle unboxing ever, and Big-Steve doing the scoring of the scavenger hunt we’d run during the course of the day.

The morning session saw about twenty-five of us literally just talking about the puzzles we’d received recently, what we were puzzling on and what we wanted to recommend to our friends. It probably won’t come as a big surprise that Brian’s Abraham’s Well got a LOT of mentions during the course of the morning – it felt like every second puzzler was wanting to talk about it and tell everyone how much they’d enjoyed it – amusingly, virtually every single one of us was still searching for the more elegant solution to one of the main steps, and we all had a good laugh about some of the approaches we’d heard of – Ali definitely took the cake!

Juno’s Sequential Discovery Cubed Box also got several mentions with everyone agreeing that it’s a wonderfully FUN puzzle to work through – there aren’t any sections that really require any hard work and some of the tools are a joy to experiment with and then use… invariably there was a conversation about how tricky it’s getting to acquire some of these puzzles with most folks just really grateful they’d managed to somehow get their hands on one.

Rainer’s T13 got several mentions too with everyone agreeing this was another masterpiece and a proper puzzle – nobody had managed to just blast through it – everyone had spent days and weeks solving it the first time.

Derek’s latest helical Polar Burr got several mentions and at least one of us had to hold up our hands to not being able to even disassemble their copy yet, let alone actually solve it!

One of the absolute delights was when Jack showed us his contribution to Gwen’s Puzzle Cave Chest project – stunning work Jack – congratulations!

In between serving customers in the shop, Tomas spent the majority of the day working on his green Revomaze – his first Revomaze. Some of us tried to suggest that he should map out the maze but he felt that was cheating so he was wished good luck – he’s going to need a boat-load of it with that strategy. :-)

Michael D shared some of the work he’d been doing on tessellations and grudgingly admitted that he’d been awarded the inaugural Ray Bathke Puzzle Design award earlier in the week at the first Camden Puzzle Party in absolute ages – congratulations Michael! His wife managed to fish out the trophy so he could share it’s punny design with all of us – it’s a big wooden key with a bath at one end… think about it.

Peter told us all about the puzzles he’d been playing with recently and then showed us a new puzzle from Dick Hensel and invited us all to get in touch with Dick if we were interested… I certainly was!

We told everyone about the slightly tweaked puzzle scavenger hunt for the day – apart from the usual explicit descriptions, there were a couple of encoded clues to be deciphered as well as a few slightly hidden clues thanks to some excellent suggestions from Nick! We published the sheet and invited all comers to submit entries to Steve for the evening’s judgement. (There’s a link to it from our Facebook page if you want a look-see.)

After a break of a couple of hours we re-joined for the latest of Frank’s Puzzle Quizzes -this time with the promise of actual prizes for the winners. Brian and Sue had donated a copy of Ten of Diamonds and I’d laid out a few things from my drawer of duplicates…

Frank took us through the quiz, featuring the odd pun (literally!), some puzzle-related questions and some tests of elementary arithmetic (I failed horribly!) and by the end Marc won himself the Ten of diamonds, Goetz bagged a recent Endo-san creation and Tamsin won herself a copy of Gobi by Eric and Alfons.

We hadn’t planned much for the rest of that session so we had a little bit more chat with some of the folks who hadn’t been there for the morning session and we lapsed into a spot of puzzle identification – I failed miserably at getting three of the puzzles I’ve been trying to identify for a few months now (admittedly I haven’t been trying that hard!). We manage to identify a whole pile of puzzle boxes that Roxanne needed identifying leaving only one or two still unidentified in the end.

George and Roxanne gave us a superb tour of the Puzzle Palace Museum after they’d managed to unpack all of the puzzles from James’ collection into their new dedicated museum (except for the ceramics that needed to wait until the shelving and the loading system were ready!). Given that earlier this year that transfer had only just been agreed and the packers hadn’t even started packing anything into the 729 boxes until late March(?) – and the containers spent a couple of months at sea – that is a phenomenal effort! 

(Rox admitted she’d kept George up working on the unpacking until 1am on the day so it would all be done in time for our “visit”!)

They took us from room to room showing how they’ve got literally everything displayed and ready for play in line with their ethos for the collection – it’s there to be played with!

There was a follow up on the interesting conversation about cataloguing the puzzles with George talking about his plans to create his own database and then potentially allow others to use the same database to store information about their own collections on it – forming the beginning of an uber-database of puzzles available as a public service for anyone interested in researching them.

After the thorough tour (thanks guys!!!!) and the invitations to visit and either help with cataloguing, repairing or just playing with puzzles, we moved on to judgement day for the participants in our scavenger hunt. This time we had a handful of entries – some of them more complete than others!

Ken’s entry was quite light in terms of actual content, but he did lay on the Brass Monkey pandering (which I believe is illegal in some states!) rather thickly - in spite of that he didn’t score very highly – perhaps the pressure of having actual prizes was playing with Steve’s playfulness (ironically something else that’s illegal in some states!).

We’d lost Brian by then so I ended up having to talk through his entry – not being privy to the man’s thinking I ad-libbed a bit but found myself getting somewhat distracted at one point (or should that be two?).

In the end most folks had managed to find some of the hidden clues, but every single person missed the requirement for a Hamster Poem, so Steve launched a quick-fire deciding round and the in the end Tamsin took the spoils with her hamster ode.

…and that was the fifth Virtual MPP… links to the recording of the sessions below for anyone wanting to re-live the sheer terror of the day, or see what you missed. (OK, it wasn’t really that terrifying… more mildly amusing, with puzzles.)

V MPP V Morning session

V MPP V Afternoon session

V MPP V Evening session

 

Spirit Box

DEDWoodCrafts master of mystery Dee Dixon recently announced a new puzzle box called the Spirit Box and I happened to find myself remembering that important fact just after the appointed release time on the appropriate date – so I was forced to purchase a copy. 

Actually, I should probably admit that it was a bit more premeditated than that given I rather like some of Dee’s other recent puzzle boxes – either way, there are still copies available on Dee’s website and in his Etsy shop  if you’re interested.

Spirit box is a smallish box with handsomely shouldered Beech sides and Granadillo top and bottom. Dee challenges you to unlock the ghosts inside – and they certainly are a rowdy bunch! Give the box a gentle shake and it sounds like there’s all sorts going in inside there. While the bottom is pretty solidly held in place, the top is kind of loose and sometimes even a bit springy… which is odd.

I’m not too proud to tell you that I spent a while exploring exactly the wrong things – keen not to be taken for a sucker… only to be taken…

I also spent a while trying to understand the sounds emanating from inside and trying to make some sort of sense of that springiness…

In the end I managed to work out the key to this elegant little mechanism – one I’d seen before, adding a little to the embarrassment of not trying out the right approach a lot earlier! Opening the box gives you a great view of the innards (very neatly made, as we’ve come to expect from Dee!) and you can safely confirm your understanding of the entire mechanism, and of course releasing the DEDWood-branded ghost inside…

It’s a cute box – certainly not too tricky as the modest price point for a beautifully-made puzzle box might suggest… it’ll make a great box to tempt newbies with and I rather like the humour in there – it’s almost as though there’s a little pun in there as well… well I think there is and I like it even more for that!

Blockistry

I suspect that the first time I saw this puzzle was among the 2020 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition entries – but sadly due to the pandemic we didn’t get to play with it at an IPP – I suspect that if I had I’d had bought myself a copy a while ago!

It popped up on my Facebook feed and then one or two folks mentioned it was worthwhile, so I duly ordered myself a copy and a few days later one of the reputable delivery companies dropped off a copy at a nearby convenience store for me…

I’m a big fan of clever packaging that shows off a puzzle and this one definitely fits the bill – the cut-out on the lid shows a nice view of the bits inside while also alluding to the overall shapes of the pieces.

Inside you’ll find four identical wooden pieces with some sides painted black and some left natural wood, there’s a little white felt backdrop for positioning pieces on and a booklet of challenges…

Try and resist the urge to examine the way they pieces are shipped and just tip them out – if you don’t, you’ll spoil your first challenge – each challenge takes the name of an element and they get progressively more and more “interesting”, as you’d expect.

I found I could work my way through quite a few of them and then I’d need to stop and Think (c) a bit every now and then as the solutions seemed to almost change gear and use different sorts of solutions – which is great for keeping puzzlers on their toes!

There are definitely a bunch of them that required quite a bit of a Think (c)… and if you do want to check your answers (although it should be pretty clear form the relative sizes and shapes of the black and natural wood in the challenges that your answers are correct) the Blockistry website has a set of solutions available behind a password.

An excellent set of puzzling challenges in a handy format… with a bunch more challenges via the Blockistry Mastermind Facebook group.

Abraham’s Well

Short version: Classic puzzle from the master of sequential discovery, Brian Young.

Slightly longer version: When I saw the warning email from Sue about the upcoming release I made sure I’d left a note for myself to check the website on the right day – sure,  there would be 150 copies available on the first day (with another 350 along behind that at some point) but there are lots of puzzlers out there that know just how good Brian’s puzzles are. Add to that those two magical words: “sequential discovery” and you can be sure that there’s going to be a huge amount of interest…

In the end, the ordering process was pretty straight-forward and I even managed to add a couple of other things to the order that I’d been meaning to pick up for a while, as well as some of their discounted own-brand disentanglements (mainly because I’m rubbish at those and desperately need the practice!).[That first batch only lasted 12 hours...!]

EMS then teased me for over a week with my care package apparently sitting on the tarmac in Brisbane being “Processed by air carrier” daily, but seemingly making no headway whatsoever. Once or twice Nigel and I swapped messages as both of our packages seemed to be stuck in the same limbo… and then all of a sardine, that changed and AusPost let me know my parcel had landed in the UK… and a day or two later it duly arrived in Barnt Green… this past Friday…

Yesterday I took it out for a bit of a play and found myself getting somewhat hooked on it – it makes for a nice little hand-full. There’s some lovely silky wood for the base and some very neat brass and steel work on the upper half. It thoroughly looks the part – right down the etched brickwork on the sides of the well. There’s a little bit of rope hanging down into the brass-lined(!) well, but no apparent pail. As you’d expect, there’s the usual Mr Puzzle branded logo on the base… and ostensibly, that’s all!

A closer examination yields a hole in the brass well-lining, and the cross-bar at the head of the well seems to turn forever… those two little screws at the head of the well may well have knurled edges, but there’s no way that you’re going to undo those without a more appropriate tool than your hands.

And that dear reader, is it… nothing seems to move, nothing seems untoward – there is nowhere to go… so you might as well start puzzling a little more seriously now. Or decide that you’ve bought a well-made ornament for your puzzle cave.

Over the course of Saturday I found myself puzzling in spurts – using my normal attack of puzzle until I get frustrated with a lack of progress – put the puzzle aside and then spending some time Think(c)ing – and return to said puzzle with a new line of attack…

That approach served me quite well over the course of Saturday and by the early evening I had a growing pile of pieces, some of which had been pretty handy as tools and I was more or less running out of places to go on this little puzzle – which concerned me a little as I knew I wasn’t finished yet: Brian is clear that when you’re finished, you’ll know it and you'll have a pewter object that links the well and Australia (which is all rather intriguing).

I knew I wasn’t finished as I hadn’t found anything made of pewter yet…

So I left it on the desk in bits and returned to it again this morning… and managed to spot something I’d overlooked the night before and a couple of minutes later I had my little pewter prize in my sweaty little paws… with a huge grin on my face.

Abraham’s Well shows that Brian’s not only a great designer of puzzlers’ puzzles, but he also has a wicked sense of humour… early on I thought I really wanted something, and Brian delivered – exactly the wrong thing! I’m pretty certain that he knew exactly what he was doing – I can see him sitting there saying to himself “Let’s get their hopes up and then crush them – it’ll be fun!”.

Brian’s description of the puzzle talks about having twenty odd bits and pieces by the time you’ve taken it all apart, with quite a few of them being quite useful little tools – only, working out which of them are tools and which aren’t is at least half the fun. [I imagined some wonderfully complicated tools during the course of my solve!]

Having got to the end of the solve, and then reassembling it for the requisite photographs, I knew which puzzle I was going to be writing about this week – in fact I’m probably not going to shut up about how good this one is for a while!

If you missed out on the first batch, there’s another 350 of them along in due course… Brian’s hoping to have them in his shop for a while… I’m not sure how successful he’s going to be at that – it is an excellent puzzle – you (and all of your puzzling friends) will want one.

More Karakuri Experiments

A couple more boxes from the designs for the Karakuri Experiments exhibition, this time from Kamei and Kawashima-san. These two are probably a bit more mainstream and traditional than the ones in the previous Karakuri post, but most definitely worth playing with.

Twin 5 is Kawashima-san’s fifth Twin box and takes inspiration from Kamei’s 1983 Top Box. The family resemblance to the other Twins is clear to see and the reference to one of Kamei’s classics might help the intrepid solver… I guess.

Start fiddling around with this one and it shouldn’t take you long to find one or two interesting things to do… but then, if you’re anything like me, you hit an absolute brick wall and can’t find any way to proceed.

I spent quite a while here, going back over the few moves I’d discovered and trying to find anything at all interesting to do along the way… and failing miserably.

I began exploring some seriously whacky theories, all to no avail. I tried some of the older tricks from this terrific craftsman’s previous puzzles – nada!

This one literally had me thinking for days until a chance discovery opened up the final move and had me gently cursing and smiling broadly at the same time…

Kawashima-san says this box “requires very few steps, so even beginners can enjoy it” – and he ain’t kidding… and part of me wonders if beginners might even solve this one quicker that well-seasoned puzzlers.

Kamei’s contribution to the exhibition was Maze Box – almost certainly a clue to the mechanism, right? (Sort of - it turns out it's a refence to another of his 1983 creations...)

The top of the box has a distinctive inlaid daisy, or Margaret / Marguerite flower that really sets this box apart – someone’s gone to a lot of trouble on this one.

Strangely the box come with three little dowels, which seem to match up with the six holes in the bottom of the box… although exactly how useful either of those two discoveries is, remains to be seen.

Once again, I spent a while exploring several fruitless avenues before thinking something along the lines of “It couldn’t really be that elegant, could it?”

This one will definitely leave you scratching your head over the mechanism that locks this puzzle up. I’m sure that there’s a relatively straight-forward approach that I just haven’t thought of yet, but I’m probably going to carry on believing that there are little fairies inside the box that release the locks when they sense that you’ve done all of the things you’re supposed to do – it really seems magical.

L Burr

I recently managed to pick up a copy of Juno’s L Burr. For some stupid reason I’d missed out on getting Brian’s Limited Edition puzzles in 2012 and I’ve been keeping an eye out for them recently… two down, three to go, I think.

This is another rather whacky puzzle from Juno where the numbers really don’t tell you anything about this puzzle! It’s “just” a 6-piece level 4 burr – but that doesn’t tell you anything about the real puzzle here.

Juno began playing around with board burr designs around 1990 and soon enough he began to explore variations on the theme, where the boards were perhaps a little morphed. L Burr resulted from that rather fruitful search. Each “board” has an L-shaped profile when viewed from the ends and that enforces some interesting restrictions when things begin to go together. Now remember that back in 1990 we didn’t have the wonder that is BurrTools handily installed on each PC in the house, so Juno designed this one in his head… over the course of a week, and it’s really unusual.

Usually once you’ve extracted the first piece from a six-piece burr, things get a whole lot simpler – after all, you’ve removed a source of several of the limitations, so the bits that are left must be easier to manipulate… right?

Wrong!

L Burr lets you proceed in a fairly traditional manner to remove the first piece after four moves… and indeed from there there are a number of routes open to the intrepid puzzler, but apparently none of them are any use whatsoever… time to Think(c).

Of course, there is a way forward, but it’s fair to describe it as pretty non-traditional and if you aren’t exactly a burrista (and I sure as heck aint!) this will invariably put the fear of all things holey into you.

Reassembly is best described as an “interesting” challenge… one I’m rather proud of being able to achieve – it took a bit of out-of-the-box thinking and was rather satisfying.

If you like board burrs, this is definitely one worth playing with – it will mess with quite a lot of your preconceptions of how these puzzles should work… definitely a puzzler’s puzzle!

Whimsical fun!

That’s the only way to describe the first one: Sword from Hiroshi Iwahara!

It’s clear the Karakuri craftsmen were allowed to give absolute free rein to their designing muses when coming up with their entries for an exhibition entitled “Karakuri Experiments” – Iwahara-san has imagined something that wouldn’t go amiss in a Zelda adventure – right down to the subtly pixelated look of the sword.

The (wooden) sword arrives safely secured inside it’s decorated wooden scabbard – it wiggles around a fair bit and teases you quite a lot. Your goal is to safely remove the sword and not give yourself a nasty nick in the process… OK the latter might be simpler than the former.

It’s not super-hard as a puzzle, but it is a delightfully whimsical creation that will put a smile on every single solver’s face, guaranteed… and it really stands out in the puzzle cabinet!

Flaskolation was Yasuaki Kikuchi’s contribution to the exhibition – his reaction to the pandemic that’s gripped the world for the past year and a half… and a contribution to puzzlers around the world to help raise a smile in these difficult times.

He gives us a box with an outline of a flask on the top and an apparent drawer on one side. The flask has a bunch of strange markings on it that don’t make an awful lot of sense at first… and then there’s the wooden syringe – well, why not?!

Some closer inspection shows a shiny little ball trapped inside the outline of the flask – that must be interesting, surely? Some medical experimentation will probably help and soon enough you’ll have the little drawer hanging open… once you’ve worked out what all those little markings really mean of course – you definitely aren’t going to fluke this one!

Last up in this post, from the same exhibition, is Conditioned Reflex – a little Pavlovian plaything from Yoh Kakuda.

I’m a dog person, so getting a puzzle that looks like a cute little puppy was always a no-brainer for me…  and then discovering along the way that it even behaves like a dog was the cherry on the top for me. Sitting still it looks cute, but during the solve it gets even cuter.

…definitely a whimsical bunch of boxes from the superb craftsmen at the Karakuri Creation Group.

Bolted

I’ve been quietly buying copies of Phil Wigfield’s puzzles for a little while now – with the arrival of Bolted, I feel the need to share my thoughts and encourage others to support this man – because he makes damn good puzzles!

Phil has a shop on Etsy called MetalPuzzlesUK where he sells the metal puzzles that he designs and makes by hand. I bought a Sticky Barrel on Ali’s recommendation (the Monkeys are never wrong!) and thought it was quite cute… I enjoyed Spinning Tumblers and I was impressed by Phil’s work in Nuts – he clearly has skillz!

With the arrival of Bolted, Phil has seriously upped the ante and properly shown his puzzle-chops!

I’ll happily admit that I’ve been spoilt by being able to play with (and sometimes even solve!) some pretty awesome metal puzzles from the likes of said-Monkeys and folks like Marcel Gillen and Rocky Chiaro over the past few years – so I’ve probably seen more than my fair-share of puzzle mechanisms and I might even be a little jaded sometimes. (I know, hard to believe, eh?!) 

…but I think Bolted stands out rather nicely in the crowd – this is a damn fine piece of puzzling engineering. There were some lovely new puzzling elements to this one that made me put on my proper puzzling hat to solve it, and when I did I had some serious respect for Mister Wigfield’s craftsmanship – the design is clever and the implementation is superb.

OK -enough of the fan-boy-ing…tell us about the puzzle!

Bolted looks just like a pair of bolts that intersect at ninety degrees with a few nuts on the smaller one which seems to go through not just the larger bolt, but also through the nut that is threaded onto it. Which is interesting… and clearly impossible… :-)

The two little nuts on the outside of the smaller bolt do indeed just spin off… but that’s the only gimme on this puzzle. Now the puzzling starts – and everything seems annoyingly legit at this point – those bolts do behave like they should, as do the remaining nuts … except that the one clearly goes right through the other one, and it won’t come out…

Find the secret and I defy you not to marvel at the bloke’s strong engineering skills, and his sense of humour at catching you a second time.

This is definitely going to be a puzzle I encourage visiting puzzlers to have a bash at because I think they’ll really get a kick out of it… it’s definitely worth picking up a copy of this one!

Gob Stopper

…or to give it it’s proper Sunday name: “Never Mind the Ball Locks, Here’s the Gob Stopper*” is the latest creation from the Two Brass Monkeys - a couple of slightly irreverent nutters who’ve been bringing their own brand of humour to the puzzle designs they’ve been producing over the last few years for an increasing band of loyal followers. Anyone thinking there’s the slightest hint of hyperbole in there should immediately refer to The Joy of Hex.

A few weeks ago one of my regular care packages from Big-Steve was somewhat heavier than I’d been expecting it to be and the cause of said heaviness turned out to be rather handsome brass ball, of sorts. I mean it’s clearly a ball, but it’s also clearly one of their hex thingies. (It’s a technical term, très scientifique!)

Fiddling around with it you’ll find a few bits that you can encourage out and if you’ve been doing your homework properly, you should have a strong sense of déjà vu at this point… proceed with the disassembly and head on over to piece identification and you’ll be able to convince yourself that at its heart, this is the Missionary Position from The Joy of Hex – albeit a Missionary of a somewhat different shape… this one positively rolls with goodness.

Assembly provides a slightly different challenge to the full Missionary given its curves – the full Missionary sits nicely in the stand that the lads thoughtfully provide, but the curves on this little beast make those stands utterly useless – so you are very much on your own with this one. As long as you’re at least a little handy (and some practice does help! As if you needed encouragement…) you should find that you can keep things in more or less the right places until they start to hold together themselves…

When the lads were describing the manufacturing process it sounded like there was a heck of a lot more work involved in making these little guys than their traditional hex puzzles – so much so that there was a time when they were seriously wondering whether it would be worthwhile making these suckers! All of the steps required for the traditional hex puzzles are there, but then they need to be assembled, turned into a ball on a lathe – without the pieces flying apart and killing anyone in the process (that part is important!) – then the pieces each need to be tumbled to knock off the sharp edges that result from the ball-turning-part-of-the-process before they’re finally ready for puzzlers to play with – without shredding their hands to bits.

All of the extra steps add significantly to the production time and effort so they do cost a bit more than their more traditional cousins, but they look excellent and play really nicely – and I’m a big fan of the antique-y pre-patinated finish that results from all of the extra work involved - I reckon it looks great!

Thank chaps!!

 

* If you’re wondering where the name comes from: the lads clearly had learnt absolutely nothing from the whole “Boaty McBoatface” debacle and decided to crowdsource a name for their latest creation using a Facebook group known to be frequented by absolute reprobates (and some puzzlers). The resulting poll, which even allowed for user-additions to the poll (what the heck are these lads thinking?!) duly settled on Ball Locks… one of said user-additions, with Ali's own “Never mind the ball hex” coming in at a respectable third place. The sheer genius was to combine those two and come up with the iconic punk reference that is “Never Mind the Ball Locks, Here’s the Gob Stopper”! There were a number of other excellent suggestions and personally I can’t wait to see what they come up with for “Jane Fondler”.