VMPP IIIX

This past Saturday saw our seventh virtual Midlands Puzzle Party, or VMPP IIIX in my tradition of messing around with Roman Numerals. (It started out innocently enough…)

Pantazis had come to my rescue offering not only an updated tour of his puzzle museum on the idyllic Greek island, but he also wanted to treat us to a lecture on the recent discoveries from his research into Archimedes’ Ostomachion. I split those two events events across the morning and afternoon sessions, with another of Frank’s Awesome Quizzes (FAQs?) slated for the evening session. (It’s traditionally the latest session to allow Frank as much time as possible to come up with enough questions…)

We kicked off the morning session with some gentle greetings and Pantazis showing us a few new combinatorics designs he’d been working on... two of which made my head hurt just thinking about how hard they would be. Once he’d mastered the wonders of technology Pantazis took us on a tour of his puzzle museum – starting at the front door proclaiming that the house was built in July 1887(!). The sympathetically restored dwelling now houses a puzzle museum where the aim is to encourage people to play with the exhibits… several of which are highly collectible.

Pantazis walked us around the rooms pausing to show us the odd extremely rare puzzle, or point out some of his particular favourites. It’s fair to say that some of the puzzles just waiting to be played with are probably unique… and most would be highly sought after by serious collectors – but for Pantazis, it’s clear that he just wants people to be able to enjoy them.

Several times during the tour he entreated the listening puzzlists to plan a trip to his idyllic little island with promises of walks in the beautiful surrounding countryside, swimming in the gorgeous warm ocean (without any creatures that wanted to kill you, unlike those in Australia - that seemed to come up quite a bit in the latter sessions – for the record, Brian just smiled).

Pantazis' enthusiasm and delight at telling us about his (now) annual puzzle event is part of the local festivities is plain to see – he’s clearly on a mission to win friends for his puzzles.

After the tour we launched into our first round of 2 Truths and a Lie (2TL, ‘cos I’m lazy!) – we asked three volunteers to tell us three “facts” about themselves, one of which was a lie, and then invited the audience to quiz them in the hopes of uncovering the lie… after the interrogation a quick Zoom poll and a final confession would establish what proportion of the audience has been successfully misled and we had ourselves a little competition.

Brian kicked us off and performed (too) respectably, with most people spotting (or guessing his lie).  Clive went next and had us all literally crying with laughter – you really do need to watch it yourself as I won’t be able to do it justice in a family-rated blog post – but please be warned: don’t watch this in the workplace or indeed near anyone who’s moderately easily offended… you will laugh yourself silly though. Clive was clearly better at telling porkies than Brian.

Next up was Steve, and we played his round a little differently – he’d given me some truths and I gave him the lie at the same time as everyone else saw the statements for the first time, and then expected him to defend them all under a veritable barrage of interrogation. It’s worth teeing up the video just to hear about his trolley-flying antics – how he didn’t kill himself I don’t know… Gill’s favourite bit: hearing about the dog’s name being spot, and his other pet being a rabbit called Stu. Sadly I fear I may have put Steve at too much of a disadvantage judging by his score… but we all had fun and frankly, that was the intention!

The afternoon session started with a couple of quick puzzle recommendations before we headed into the main event - Pantazis talking about his research into Archimedes’ Ostomachion. For those of you not familiar with it, it’s an ancient dissection of a square that has a number of solutions and some interesting properties…

Pantazis’ research has combined his love of mathematics with his keen interest in Ancient Greek – something he needed regularly to makes sense of the historic texts and fragments he ended up researching and comparing in order to understand the puzzle. It seems there are a few different versions of the dissection, some of which appeared to be pretty arbitrary – leading Pantazis to posit an alternative dissection that satisfies all of the constraints described in the ancient texts, but produces a “cleaner” set of pieces which dispenses with the arbitrary nature of some of the cuts… which is interesting… (©LB)

The bit that really grabbed my attention was when Pantazis introduced a means of measuring difficulty of the solutions based on the number of maximal cuts visible in the solution… with the hardest solution having no maximal cuts… I thought that was a really clever way of thinking about difficulty in this context…

Given the mathematical bent of a number of folks on the call (where else is there going to be a serious discussion of "your favourite equation" going to make perfect sense?!) and Pantazis' clear enthusiasm for the topic, the talk went down really well – Thanks for sharing a bit of your clear passion with us, Pantazis!

After the lecture we lowered the tone with another round of 2TL, giving Nigel, Mike, Pantazis and Marc the opportunity to lie to their friends around the world. This time we heard about Nigel getting knocked down by Muhammad Ali, Mike’s gourmet gobbling buddy, Pantazis’ Hoff-baiting exploits and Marc’s cruciverbalist streak… once again – all good for a laugh!

The evening session started with four more pants-on-fire puzzlers in the shape of Rik, Steve, Haym and Ali. This time we had to contend with someone shaving the mayors’ nuts, driving across Europe with a broken arm, serving Bill Gates a Diet Coke and trying to get a push from the police when way too young to drive. Perhaps it was the time of the day, or the inspiration of earlier competitors, but the standard of lying had definitely clicked up a notch in the evening session, with scores being dramatically better until Haym was crowned the best liar of the bunch – you’ve been warned: don’t play poker with the man!

After declaring Haym the winner (mental note: must send him a prize!) we handed over to Frank for the eagerly anticipated quiz. As always Frank had not only come up with some great new rounds, he’d put in a huge effort on the questions.

Round one was a Wordle-style challenge where the clues were given Wordle-style and you had to work out what the answers were from the letters you could and couldn’t use… fiendishly good!

There was a round of place names where the simple question was "Is this place in the USA, the UK or in New Zeeland?" (in deference to Steve’s current position…) – I think I managed to score only slightly above the expected level of 33% for that round … and then I did very badly in the dad-joke round – but somehow I managed to come in second place to the Nick-ster – so I immediately disqualified myself on the grounds that I’d actually seen one of the questions beforehand when Frank needed an opinion on whether a question was too hard – I managed to solve it so he made it slightly harder! :-)

After the quiz there was a little wind-down chatter and some more last-night-in-the-pub-at-IPP-vibes where it seemed that folks didn’t really want to say goodbye… which was kinda nice to see – it’s almost like we done a good thing here…

Thanks a stack to Pantazis for all of the presenting and enthusiasm he imparted, and to all of our 2TL contestants, and a huge thank you to Frank for FAQ!

 [I couldn't resist sharing my favourite Wordle-style puzzles from Frank...]

Links to the recordings of the sessions: 

Morning Session

Afternoon Session

Evening Session

Wine Not

 Last year Gill managed to track down an incredible surprise for my birthday – she colluded with friends of ours to get me a copy of Brian’s 1998 limited edition Wine Not. (Yup, she’s amazing!)

Over the years I’ve been trying to plug some of the many gaps in my collection of Brian’s puzzles, but there are some that really don’t come up for sale very often… Wine Not is one of those! Hardly surprising given that he only made a dozen copies, and that was about 23 years ago!

Wine Not is Brian’s riff on a two-dimensional design in EM Wyatt’s classic Puzzles in Wood. Wyatt’s version consisted of a pair of interlinked squares called Locked Links. Brian’s trades the squares for cubes and results in a structure that looks remarkably like a wine rack, unless you look at it closely, at which point you realise there’s actually no place for the wine bottles to go, given the overlap between the cubes…

The puzzle starts out as a fairly large pile of sticks – neatly a dozen in Queensland Walnut and another dozen in Queensland Silver Ash… examining the sticks shows your that there are definite sets of similar pieces and some of there are a little unusual which provides a bit of a clue as to how the structure goes together…

Decide on a strategy and begin to piece things together, and as long as you’ve thought things through properly, you should find you can end up with a pair of neatly interlocked cubes without having to resort to bending the pieces. [Spoiler Alert: Brian’s bits don’t bend!]

Definitely a statement piece in the collection now. This one stands proud among most of Brian’s creations – not just because of it’s size. :-)

Thanks Gill and Sue for all the collusion and spoiling me rotten for my birthday last year!

Axes and Hammer

Let me start by making one thing absolutely clear: I am rubbish at disentanglements!

Yet, for some reason, I decided that I rather liked the looks of Axes and Hammer when it was entered in the 2020 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition. Some time later I reached out to the designer and managed to acquire a copy… albeit the wonders of the pandemic and its impact on the international postal system meant that I had to be a little mor patient than usual while it wended its way from China to little old Barnt Green – but wend, it did, and I was delighted with the quality of this little guy.

The axes have a nice shape and profile and the hammer is pleasingly solid – marry that with the not insubstantial chain, and you have a puzzle that is not going to allow you to do anything that you absolutely shouldn’t be able to…

At first glance, Axes and Hammer looks like a standard disentanglement – do something where you wouldn’t normally expect to do it, and Hey Presto, the ring’s free! Although knowing that it’s been accepted into the design competition lets you know immediately that it’s not going to be nearly that simple!

And it isn’t… in fact it’s rather tricky – and relies on the puzzler noticing a few little details made possible by some neatly designed features and pretty good tolerances… in fact, there’s one part of the solution that is very fussy indeed – if you don’t approach things absolutely perfectly, you’ll be convinced it’s not going to work… and duly shift your attention elsewhere.

This one’s definitely a puzzlers’ puzzle, in my humble opinion… one for someone who thinks they know what to do and is open to a little lesson in humility from a talented designer… this one doesn’t suffer fools and demands you pay attention to the details, or you end up going round and round in circles. (Yup, got that t-shirt!)  

 

Loki

I was one of those folks who signed up for Boaz’s announcements so that I’d know as soon as Loki was available… and ordered one as soon as it became available… and it arrived soon afterwards.

However, since it took me virtually two months of trying to solve it, on and off, this blog post is only seeing the light of day now… well after most people will have bought it, and solved it, and told everyone else they liked it… but here I am anyway, ‘cos it earned my respect… lots of it!

Boaz has impeccable pedigree when it comes to puzzle locks – his dad is almost certainly the undisputed king of modified lock puzzles – everybody rates them by how they compare with the Danlock. Boaz himself has produced some excellent modified lock puzzles using some wonderfully imaginative ideas in the form of BLock and BLock II… so when he announced that he was particularly proud of Loki, we all expected something a little special.

Boaz did not disappoint.

Loki is indeed the very king of tricksters – fooling you at literally every turn – never letting you make much progress without dropping another massive roadblock in your path… and even when you might be tempted to think you’re done, you’re only halfway, trust me!

I suspect that like most folks I made a bit of progress quite quickly – and that little bit had me impressed from the get-go. There is some very classy machining involved here. From there I hit a roadblock that literally stopped me for more than a month… I had some theories about how I needed to progress, but I couldn’t work out how the heck to make them work… until a massive “A-Ha!” struck, ironically as I was describing what I wanted to do to a fellow puzzler – Nigel’s a patient listener!

Finding how to execute that plan, with all its little tricks took another week or two and that gave me what felt like a massive step forward – except Loki’s tricks baffled me once more and it took another few days before I finally had the shackle out!

Hurrah! Cue sense of achievement and victory photographs…

…only to be thoroughly crushed when I tried to reset things, and realised that they wouldn’t work the way I wanted them to…

Fast forward another week or two or experimenting this way and that, including making life very difficult for myself in search of a feasible reassembly path… so I did me a THINK (c) and simplified things, and found a way through the morass and had everything back where it had started… leaving me with a profound respect for this little trickster and the cunning man behind it.

As a puzzler you might have seen one or two of the ticks somewhere else, but there are several you’ve never seen anywhere before, and you have absolutely never seen that many of them all in one neat little NABOB-sized package before.

Boaz, you are your father's son and you ought to be extremely proud of this puzzle.

TUTU

Volker Latussek’s TUTU was the pick of the bunch for me from the Pelikan Workshop’s latest release.

It’s one of those beguiling little puzzles with four simple pieces – 2 pairs of a ‘T’ and a ‘U’ and a 3*3*2 box with a restricted entry in the shape of a T. It’s immediately clear from the pieces and the box that you need to put the pieces (fully) inside the box… and if you count the voxels, it’s clear that there can’t be any empty space in the box – which is great because that cuts down the possible arrangements you might need to test significantly.

So you start out thinking this one’s going to be simple – for once… only this designer doesn’t really have a reputation for releasing puzzles that anyone has ever described as simple…

It won’t take long to convince yourself that there isn’t a simple sequence that will allow you to simply drop the four pieces into the box, no matter what order you try.

As there’s no spare place inside the box, so you can deduce what the final move needs to be… or at least reduce it to two possibilities! From there you can begin experimenting with possible arrangements to figure out what forms of manipulation are feasible – for manipulations there must be!

What I really loved about this puzzle is the sheer number of times I convinced myself that it was impossible – I knew that I’d worked through every possible set of manipulations and orders and proved to myself that none of them worked… not just once, but several times… proved!

…and then as I’m oft wont to say, having decided it was impossible (once more!), I was finally free to explore something else – something else that indeed allowed me to find the impossible and cram all four bits neatly into the elegant little box… with a huge sense of satisfaction and more than a little “A-Ha!”.

It’s great – and as you’d expect, wonderfully precisely made by the chaps at Pelikan.

 

Bruns Metal Barrel Puzzle

Andriy, aka ‘Engineer Bruns’ has been making and selling machined metal puzzles from his web shop for a few years now. He’s been producing some curiosities (cube-in-cube-in-cube-in-cube anyone?) and ornaments (I couldn’t resist a copy of the Bender-like figurine) and then recently he began selling a puzzle of his own design in the form of a mini oil barrel – so I signed up for one because I was keen to encourage him to explore his own designs.[When you order something it goes on the list to be made, by hand, so expect to have to wait a bit for your personally made puzzles.] 

What’s clear from the extensive library of YouTube videos is that Bruns knows his stuff – there’s a fair amount of teaching and techie stuff about metal lathe work that I’m not going to profess to understand the half of, but it’s clear he’s doing something he loves – and he’s doing it really well! [Fair warning: if you watch any of the videos of Bruns making his puzzles you'll also see their solutions.]

The Metal Barrel Puzzle is just that – designed to resemble a scaled down 44-gallon drum, it’s a little aluminium barrel – complete with a BRUNS logo and a cap engraved on the lid… it looks great, but what’s it like as a puzzle I hear you ask…

Well first of all, let me point out the obvious: I’m writing about it – so I like it. (I don’t write about puzzles I don’t like, remember?) Secondly, having solved it, I immediately wanted to tell my mates about it because I thought it was a great puzzle… so there you go – you needn’t bother reading the rest, really.

Starting out, this little guy gives away just the slightest clue to where you start making some progress… and if you don’t explore enough, you won’t get any further…

Once you find how to make some progress you might think you’re onto a winner and this puzzle is going to yield its secrets in no time at all… only it’s going to kick you in the teeth and stop you dead in your tracks… time to THINK(c).

Having thunk you may indeed make some further progress, only to...(you guessed it!) be stuck dead in your tracks all over again… and this time you’re going to have to really THINK(c)!

When you do manage to get this little guy opened you’re rewarded with a full view of all of the innards (which I suspect will be simpler than you’ve imagined them to be!) and a Bruns original Skynet coin – from the future! :-)

What I really like about this puzzle is the number of times it forces you to stop and think – you think you understand things only to realise that you don’t and you’re forced to start THINKing all over again… that's what I really like in my puzzles, and Bruns delivers in this one, beautifully.

Here’s hoping that he’s suitably encouraged to continue experimenting with his own new puzzle designs!

Mind the Gap

Back in December Andrew Coles announced that he had a new design that he was almost ready to inflict on the public. He offered a few of us the chance to purchase an early copy and given just how different Lock Out was, I immediately sent him some PayPal to secure a copy… and not long after I had a big old hunk of brass in my paws.

Mind the Gap is another Abus lock that Andrew has modified into being a trick lock. This one has a hefty straight shackle that passes between two extended bits of the main body of the lock (apparently this is a shutter-style lock) – it looks like it means business – and if it doesn’t intimidate you at least a bit, you’re clearly a locksmith. For the most part it doesn’t look like it’s been heavily modified, although there is a screwhead that looks a little incongruous, suggesting that all is perhaps not quite what it may seem.

The lock and a pair of keys on the customary AC key fob come inside one of Andrew’s gold embossed velvet bags. The little card that accompanies the lock asks you to fully open the shackle… which is interesting, normally you wouldn’t need any form of qualification in an instruction like that… but there must be a reason… surely.

…and indeed there is – it becomes apparent as soon as you insert one of the keys into the lock and turn it – the shackle spits out, just a little, and stops right there… which sort of feels like progress, only now you have a bit of a puzzle to solve. The locky bit has done its thing, yet nobody in their right mind would describe this shackle as being fully open…

And it turns out that’s the start of a lovely little journey into Andrew’s wonderfully creative world. Lock out used something wonderfully unique in trick locks, and dare I say it, Mind the Gap continues that tradition.

There’s fun and games with lots of things to discover along the way and before you ultimately get the shackle all the way open (albeit still trapped – and that’s right). The good news is that resetting this little puppy isn’t entirely trivial and does need you to keep some of your wits about you…

Once again Andrew has produced something totally new in a puzzle lock – something that will amuse even the most jaded of trick lock afficionados.

EPP 2021

You should all already know all about Peter’s Annual End of year Puzzle Party (EPP) – he’s been running them for years and I’ve blogged about them more than a few times in the past… the last Thursday in 2021 saw 30-odd folks (yup, some of us are pretty odd! – I might as well get in there before you do…) gathering from literally around the world via Zoom to present our top three puzzling acquisitions of 2021 and enjoy some gentle banter and light entertainment.

We started off with some general catching up given that most of us haven’t seen one another in real life for about two years now. There was some housekeeping (generally begging everyone to put themselves on mute when they weren’t actually talking -wanna take bets on how well that went?!) and a rough run through of the agenda before we launched into each presenting our top three picks.

I abused my chair’s privilege to go first and introduced my three top acquisitions of the year as:

Brass Monkey 5: This was easily the puzzle that has given me the most joy this year – firstly in solving it (I literally cried with laughter) and then chatting with friends around the world as they solved it. If you don’t already know what all of the fuss is about, you need to get one!

Sequential Discovery Cubed Box:  Juno manages to cram a wonderfully whimsical journey of discovery into an innocent-looking wooden cube. The first move is a delightfully insistent invitation to play – it just gets better and better. Some wonderfully innovative tools and locks lead to the final compartment with plenty of puzzling pleasure along the way.

Jack’s Tippenary Mystery Tour: A veritable Tardis of a puzzle box – Jack has literally broken the laws of nature cramming all that puzzling into a box this small. A series of challenges results in the appearance of a badly-behaved old friend you may have been expecting – work out why and you’ll discover even more.

This year Peter had once again allowed us a fourth nomination for a commercially available puzzle and I used that ticket to nominate Abraham’s Well: Brian Young’s latest sequential discovery tour de force. Peeling back the layers of this onion will give any puzzler a massive sense of achievement – finding a way to do it with virtually no force whatsoever is the crowning achievement. Brilliant engineering meets superb craftsmanship in this elaborate, yet compact, challenge.

From there I did my best to step between all of the puzzlers from Japan in the east to the US west coast… with everyone presenting their top three or four picks, and then giving the occasional shout out to any other puzzles deserving of special mention for others to look into. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one frantically scribbling notes as we went through the pics noting down the puzzles that others thought were awesome that I hadn’t played with yet…

As usual the nominations ran the gamut from simple plastic keychain puzzles right up to some glorious creations costing literally several thousand… yet the one thing they all shared was that they’d made a puzzler’s year – I always like listening to puzzlers talking about why specific puzzles are special to them – whether that be how it makes them feel when they solve them, or how they managed to get hold of something that they’d been after for ages…

In between the nominations we had a couple of breaks for libations and other important matters. James gave us a bit of a tour of his merely jaw-dropping (remaining) collection of Berrocal’s, 500 selected puzzles and the swaps and spares that didn’t end up in George and Rox’s Museum. At the end of the tour James asked anyone who might have spare copies of any old Pentangle puzzles, particularly the dexterity puzzles, so that he could put together a complete collection of them for his son… if anyone has any, please do get in touch.

After the second break Clive entertained us with an excellent magic effect, and then Angelo Carbone gave us a short talk showcasing one of his newer inventions and explained one of his older ones that uses a rather puzzling box as it’s centrepiece… it’s clear why Peter’s so keen to encourage him to turn his hand to designing puzzle boxes after seeing that explanation.

At the end of the nominations, Peter took over proceedings and announced the winners:

Juno’s Sequential Discovery Cubed Box came in first place, with Jack’s Tippenary Mystery Tour coming second and Brian’s’ Abraham’s Well coming third.

Juno also took the title for Best Designer and for Most Prominent Craftsman – giving him an elegant hat-trick, for the first time in the history of Peter’s EPPs – an awesome achievement!

After the formal proceedings wound down, a bunch of folks hung around to chat a bit more – it definitely had the feel of the final night at an IPP where nobody wanted to admit that it was over for another year… it was super to catch up with everyone for a bit…

Thanks to Peter for organising another grand EPP!

2021 Christmas Puzzle Puzzle Solution

[Yup - SPOILERS!] 

I guess it’s traditional for me to explain my Christmas puzzle round about now, so here goes…

This year’s puzzle was a bit different – for one thing, you actually had to do some work before you even got hold of the real puzzle, but in my defence, I did try and leave some breadcrumbs!

First of all there was the colourful text – that was quite unusual for my blog… and then there were some stray bits of capitalisation – collect all the unexpected capitals and you were told to “LOOK CLOSER”… which considered with the colours was leading you to look at the blog text – where each para had some stray text after it in white on white – which is either visible when highlighted or if you’re looking at the page source code… that resolves to “bit.ly/allard25122021” and if you pop that into a browser you’ll find yourself looking at a vaguely familiar format for my Christmas Puzzles..

 

That gives you instructions ("I want a three digit number") and some clues in the form of text and pictures… the flavourtext gives some helpful clues referring to “times”, “competitive” and “initially” … and if you look VERY closely at the bottom right of the frame around the pics you’ll see some text saying “Thanks Nick & John”. Hopefully you’ll recognise a couple of the puzzles among the sixteen and realise they’ve all been entries in the annual Puzzle Design Competition (latterly the Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition) which is run by Nick Baxter and hosted on John Rausch’s website… which makes sense of the “competitive” reference and the “Thanks Nick & John” note.

Now you’re in the familiar territory of having to find data points on all of the puzzles in the grid, which you can do by using the search functionality on John’s website – if you put in blank search parameters it will list all of the entries by year…

If you start doing this and work your way through the grid you’ll notice that they’re almost perfectly in alphabetical order, perhaps except for the first entry if you didn’t use it’s full name… which is “(Now they know how many holes it takes to fill) The L-Bert Hall”. If you list all the puzzle names and the years they entered (“times” :-) ), you’ll notice that the entry years are unique, which is handy and provides a natural order, which can’t be a coincidence. [Orientation of the pics was just me being a b@stard!]

Ordering the puzzle names by entry year and focusing just on the first letters (“initially”) provides the following text: “WELLDONEBURRMUDA”, or if you add a few spaces “WELL DONE BURRMUDA”. Hopefully the “WELL DONE” bit gave you some confidence that you were on the right track… then you just needed to work out how to get a three-digit number out of that… and hopefully it wasn’t too much of a stretch to realise that Burrmuda was a Stewart Coffin design (and not a country) and he always gives his designs a number – Burrmuda happened to be 112, which in turn happens to be a three-digit number, the final confirmer.

Massive congratulations to Brendan Perez who was the first person to crack my puzzle in just under 12 hours from publication, while navigating Christmas duties! Around four hours later he was joined on the podium by Steve Canfield (who went to a lot more trouble than I’ve ever gone to for his first Christmas puzzle – check it out!). The final spot on the podium was taken by Mike Quigley later on Boxing Day morning, with Steve Nicholls hot on his heels (possibly due to some collaborative work there). Amy and Josh were the final two solvers later on boxing Day and then we’ve had no more people solve it since then… so you should all consider yourselves a rarefied bunch of puzzlers – well done! And thanks for playing along!!

Some goodies from my drawer of swaps will be heading out to the first three places shortly.

[Thanks to Nick & John for providing the fodder for the hunt and to Nick for checking my work.]

The list of puzzles for anyone who’s interested, in order of entry year:

• Walk of Ladybird
• Edge Corner Cube
• Loris
• Little Maze N’ Cubes
• Dipole Dilemma
• Othogenesis
• (Now they know how many holes it takes to fill) The L-Bert Hall
• Easy Eight, Hard Eight
• Barb’s Cube
• UFO
• Road Blocks
• Rising Sun
• Moulin Rouge
• Unicum
• Double Cube
• Axes and Hammer

Fun fact: I hadn't intended or even realised that the puzzles were pretty much in alphabetical order in the grid - and only when someone pointed it out did I realise that it was the result of InDesign's 'Place' function - when you place a bunch of selected files in one go, they go in alphabetically by filename - and I had the puzzle names at the start of the filenames.