MPP LCII

This was definitely the most exclusive MPP in a long while… we had none of the usual overseas visitors and Big-Steve was over in Hobbit-land visiting his mum. As a result MPP literally only started at 10am on Saturday for me instead of the evening before. I picked up some milk and cold drinks on my way to the hall and I’d just about got most of my stuff out of the car when Ali and the London gang pulled in.

I set up the stuff in the kitchen while the lads unpacked some tables and chairs… clearly channelling Steve in the process… they settle on one straight row and a zig-zag row to encourage conversation, with one table up against the wall for anyone we didn’t like… in the end that one didn’t get used – draw your own conclusions!

I’d printed a bunch of things to dish out and spent a while encouraging folks to have a play with a three-piece cube assembly I’d found on Printables by something called mad gardener – I’d printed off a pile of the 4*4*4 cubes because I thought they were fun, and a couple of the 5*5*5 cubes because I thought they were less fun… clearly I’m not a good judge of puzzles as everyone who played with the 5*5*5 succeeded in assembling them rather rapidly and pronounce them good… I managed to find homes for all of the 5*5*5’s and a chunk of the 4*4*4’s, but there’s still a pile of those left, so I may need to take them to America to foist them on some unsuspecting puzzlers who don’t know better.

I’d also printed off a few sets of George Bell’s Hex Screws – I’d tried, spectacularly unsuccessfully to put the simple assembly together so I offer rich a copy if he’d assemble a set for me – and of course I wanted the difficult assembly – it was Rich after all! He ended up spending a fair amount of time, but managed to crack it in the end and I now have an assembled copy in my cabinet – and if anyone disassembles it, they will probably be drowned in the tears of a disentanglement of puzzlers – you’ve been warned…

Rich brought along a couple of sets of Akaki’s baskets and a few folks who hadn’t yet made their acquaintance ended up scoring a few of them – he’d re-printed a set in a different size so he was giving away the smaller set – good lad!

Rich also brought along a bunch of his own designs – a couple of design studies of three-linked six-piece burrs -one set included Love’s Dozen and Piston Burr tied to a third burr to make for some interesting interactions – I can vouch for the fact that it’s well-challenging trying to keep your head around them…

He also had a few simple little two piece take-aparts that lead you nicely up the garden path and then stop you and make you think when you get onto the third one…

One of the good things about having a smaller bunch this time around was that we got to spend some time getting to know folks a little better – I had no idea that Pastor Dan was in fact a Reverend (available for weddings, divorces and burials – apparently he never leaves home without a shovel just in case he’s called upon) and we heard about the time Kyle thought he’d nearly died in a hot tub (literally days before that Friendly actor did) – he’d finished off (but not in a weird way – © KCM) in the hot tub outdoors in the driving rain (again, not in a weird way – © KCM) when he became very light-headed (you’re getting the hang of this now, aren’t you?) and he swears there was no Ketamine involved, but apart from that, the likeness with Matthew Perry’s death a few days later was apparently uncanny! (But not in a weird way – © KCM.)

Kyle had a set of his wooden puzzles and I took the opportunity to play with them as I hadn’t seen them before… I can definitely see why they’ve been so popular on Discord – I managed to limp my way through the first two, but the third one had me asking for a hint and still not getting any further… so I’m going to have to try again in the future.

Hugo the Hippo had arrived earlier in the week so he had an outing and several folks enjoyed taking him to bits and then reassembling him…

We totally managed to miss out on the pig rolls, arriving on the high street just after they’d sold out so I ended up with pork en croute and an onion bhaji. Healthy eating at its finest!

Dale tormented Frank and a few others with Teddy’s Bear(?) which arrived and left in bits – spending a brief amount of time badly (very badly!) entangled, but never solved.

Back at the house afterwards Frank and Chris had a go at Jesse’s Captain’s Quest – Frank doing most of the solving with Chris proving a running sound effect score to enhance Frank’s solving experience (but not in a weird way – © KCM). When the sound effects weren’t amusing Chris sufficiently, he resorted to words of encouragement (“Pump, it more Frank” – albeit not in a weird way – © KCM). At one point most of us were in tears – but to their credit, they did manage to pretty much complete the solve…

Some of Juno's older designs had a thorough playing with and Lilly showed the boys a thing or two onAir lock and Ziggu-Hook. Alexander Magyarics' Delta Force (courtesy of Tye) had a good playing with with quite a surprising number of folks managing to find the symmetric assembly...

Somewhere in between there was some fish and chips and most folks headed home as it was getting dark, so not too late an evening… and then on Sunday, I find myself with time to write up the obligatory blog post… and while it still feels weird not having any visitors at all for an MPP, it was a damn fun day’s puzzling with my mates – thank you all for the amusement you provided, intentionally or otherwise!

Spinning Tumblers v2

Phil’s first Spinning Tumblers was a nice puzzle – not massively challenging – things largely did what you wanted them to do - you know – it was fun!

Then Eric stepped it up a notch with Psycho Disks, where some things didn’t quite do what you wanted them to… sometimes. It definitely added some confusion.

Now Phil’s taken things to a whole new level. You may think you know what to expect, but trust me you don’t!

Sure, the family resemblance is still there – the form factor is pretty much identical, most of the disks spin, most of the time, and sometimes you’ll even feel like you can controls things… but just when you think you’ve got it sussed, Phil throws you a curveball and you’ll find yourself having a “what the heck?!” moment.

I spent a while going backwards and forwards and struggling to make head or tail of things… I’d come up with a theory and then have it totally blown out of the water a few minutes later… there are elements that behave in ways we’ve seen before, and then there is just plain weirdness that makes almost no sense…

I’d spent absolute ages plugging away at it while learning very little so I took it across on my King’s Day jaunt hoping I’d get some quality puzzling time… and then Ali duly sat down and solved it in front of me in a matter of minutes – I was somewhat gobsmacked, but when I had a look at what was happening inside there, my admiration for both Ali’s solving prowess and Phil’s puzzle-design-chops grew ten-fold.

The family lineage may be clear, but the guts of this little beastie are next generation… after I’d snapped a pic of my serial number (04 for the record) Ali carefully put it back together and rather kindly left “things” quite near the solved position, which was nice of him… the friendly customs man at Schiphol on the way home managed to undo that kindness, so when I got home and tried to open it up again, I found myself having to start from pretty much from scratch – serves me right, I guess!

Armed with a little knowledge of what I’d seen inside there, I managed, with a fair amount of struggling(!) to finally get STv2 open once again… there is so much more to the second version - think of the first one as your genial nan, and the second one as the wolf in nan’s nightclothes salivating while waiting for Little Red Riding Hood.

Phil, you beat me – I suspect I’d still be wandering in the woods if Ali hadn’t helped me out a bit (OK, a lot!) on this one! 

An elegantly simple, excellent design, beautifully made as usual!!

 

King’s Day 2024

The alarm goes off at 5:30 last Saturday morning and I’m happy - this is one of my favourite weekends of the year: Wil throws a brilliant get-together at his place in Venlo on this Sunday each year (pandemic permitting) and I get to spend a weekend with my mates puzzling without having to do any of the organising myself!

I get to the airport a bit early as there’s a lot of building work in the terminal and there have been some horror stories of massive queues for security… but I find myself getting sent through the priority lane (for no good reason) and I manage to bypass even the little queue there was… of course my bag gets pulled for checking because I’ve brought Phils latest little brass wonder to puzzle on over the weekend. It gets a swabbing and another run through the x-ray machine before I’m allowed to hit Starbucks for a very leisurely coffee and croissant accompanied by some Nikoli puzzles to get the brain going – I’m not sure it works.

The flight is uneventful and after a bit of a detour through immigration I grab a train leaving within minutes of getting onto the platform. I send up the bat signal to let Louis know which train I’m on and he finds me in the usual spot… at this stage I should probably comment on the massive crowds all wearing orange for King’s Day – I look severely under-dressed without any orange clothing whatsoever – it’s easy to spot the tourist!

I check in and ditch the baggage and we head to Louis’ place where Steve and Ali are in full-on puzzle mode – resplendent in their orange t-shirts… I feel even more unpatriotic! Louis puts on a massive spread for lunch before we settle into some communal puzzling.

I’d taken along a bunch of copies of Rik Bouwer’s KubusMix, courtesy of George Bell’s STLs (Thanks George!) as well as a couple of 3D printed Wayne Daniels Four Piece Tetrahedrons, once again courtesy of George’s STLs. The boys didn’t take long to assemble them and I reckon everyone gets a kick the first time they realise what those six strange-looking pieces in two colours might just make…

Ali had a go at my copy of Phil’s Spinning Tumblers v2 and made relatively short work of it – so I now know that I have #4. I have a quick squizz at the innards before Ali very carefully puts it back in the bag ready to open… although he needn’t have bothered – by the time I get through Schiphol security they’ve had it out and fiddled with it and when I get home I found it’s all locked up again… serves me right for trying to be cute!

Minima’s Domino and Twig are also a hit at the table, but nobody manages to find a solution for Delta Force that Tye chucked into my last order (“so that the box wouldn’t be empty!”)…

I have a fiddle with a few of Ali’s Craig Lawton 9-Layer Puzzles – they really are nicely made from nine laser-cut layers of wood and acrylic. I manage to solve one of them properly, another opens with a bit of luck but the others remain well and truly locked up… maybe next time…

Louis orders in a pile of pizzas for dinner before we head out to an escape room… in Belgium. With everyone wearing orange all day and most of the locals visiting either a music festival or a street-market somewhere, all of the local escape rooms are closed, so Louis has found one for us half an hour away in Belgium, as you do…

The escape room turns out to be a bank heist and the gang throw themselves into it as though this was their day job. We play dress-up – Louis looked particularly fetching in that red coat, break into a couple of safes, crack several passwords, abuse an ATM and defeat a Mission Impossible style laser-field to grab the gold… we did spend a while trying to get through the laser-field “properly”, i.e. Louis tried to climb over and around the beams but that wasn’t particularly successful, so in the end Steve just barrelled through it and grabbed the gate before it had a chance to lock itself. After our successful escape we had quite a long debrief in the car on the way back to Louis’ with Steve comparing his dash for the gate to the grace of a gazelle, while others preferred comparisons to silverbacks and rhinoceroses.

A few more hours puzzling back at Louis’ before he dropped us back at the hotel somewhere around midnight… I crash and get up in time to join Ali and Steve for breakfast… it’s a long breakfast with plenty of chat, including discussion of the relative merits of gazelles and rhinoceroses. Louis collects us and we head off to Venlo. (No rhinos spotted en route.)

Wil greets us like long-lost friends and he’s soon plying us with coffee and tarts (of the local fruity variety). Folks start arriving from all over the countryside and soon there’s a pretty decent throng of puzzlers filling up the house and the garden – complete with a new roof extension covering half the garden – that pays for itself later in the day when the heavens opened briefly and we were able to shelter outside without overrunning the living room.

I spread around the remaining copies of KubusMix and encourage folks to have a play and help themselves to a copy and I manage to get rid of all them, just so I don’t need to cart them all home again, you understand. Only a few folks manage to get the colouring wrong and incur a little abuse as a result.

At lunchtime there are some really scrumptious pizzas and we get to meet Wil’s daughter… later there’s more of the usual spread of sandwiches and sweet treats and plenty of coffee and coke to go around.

At some point Steve and I gravitate upstairs to trawl through the many crates just in case there’s some treasure in there. Steve gamely unpacks a crate at a time for us to rake through until he realises his mistake and finds himself trapped behind a wall of puzzles and to-be-puzzles – although in fairness to Wil, sometimes it’s not easy to work out the difference between the two – everything is a puzzle for Wil… some of them just aren’t quite finished yet.

I have a great time catching up with old friends, passing on some English chocolates and exchanging some foldy stuff for a couple of old Rockys and a Petit Four I’m missing.

Everyone has to spend a while playing with Oskar’s latest creations (it’s da law!) and I find myself really enjoying his latest Zigu-variant so I purchase a copy of Zigu-Hook as it’s really fun to fiddle with. He has all manner of new bolts and gears and toys and it’s easy to spend an hour or two just fiddling.

Sometime after five, Wil rounds everyone up and we pile into cars off to his favourite Chinese Restaurant that's just in the throes of reopening properly after the pandemic. We must have about 16 people and they manage to deal with the challenge of feeding a bunch of hungry puzzlers who are dead-set on puzzling most of the way through their dinner… the food is as good as it ever was.

More puzzling and chatter back at Wil’s place after dinner before Louis drops us back at the hotel and I mange to crash at about 1am… I’m not built for late nights anymore!

The monkeys join me for breakfast bright and early next morning even though their flight is only late that afternoon. We chat about the fun we’ve had, puzzles we’ve unexpectedly chanced upon and solved and the relative merits of various sorts of wild animals, oddly. (rhino > gazelle)

I grab the train to Schiphol and kill a few hours with my Nikoli booklet again. Aside from a bit of a wait getting onboard the aircraft due to a delay in getting some inbound passengers off it, my travel home is pretty uneventful… even if I have to leave the sunshine behind at Schiphol.

Thanks Wil for hosting us all and Louis for taking care of us the whole weekend – that was a really brilliant weekend.

More Minima!

Just after I wrote about the set of Minima Puzzles I’d acquired, both Tye and Frederic got in touch. Frederic happily engaged in a bit of back and forth on the thinking behind the Minima series, how he approaches the design process and told me about a couple of Minima designs that will hopefully be produced in the future – some of which sound absolutely awesome! Tye was chuffed that I’d enjoyed them so much and had appreciated the effort that went into producing them.

Frederic and Tye both pointed out that there was another already in the Nothing Yet Designs shop (Minima Domino), with a further one due along shortly… so I duly bought a copy of Domino and asked Tye to hang onto it as I was about to head out on holiday… somewhere along the way Minima Twig was released and I added that to the order and when I got back home, Tye shipped them over… along with a pile of other puzzles he just threw in, “so that the box wouldn’t be empty”! (Thanks Tye - I’m still working my way through a few of those!)

Minima Domino consists of the usual form-factor box with a single 2*1 opening on one side. Two of the other sides have a small slit and there are a number of thoughtful holes to facilitate a little manoeuvring of the pieces inside the box… there are a couple of captive blocks already helpfully placed in opposite corners and your task is to simply insert the 5 dominoes into the box…

See when I said those two blocks had been helpfully placed in the opposite corners, I lied… it turns out they really make things a lot more complicated. Once again the elegance of the design shines through on this puzzle – the 5 dominoes are identical so you don’t need to keep track of different pieces – it’s all “just” about getting them inside the box.

I ended up spending some time working through the potential ways of arranging the pieces in the box in a bid to reduce the number of assemblies to try… it’s not hard to deduce what’s possible for the final move or two, but the “interesting” bit is then trying to get the preceding pieces into place without needing to move pieces through one another or indeed through the side wall of the box.(The latter is discouraged.)

As you’d expect, every little element of the design is both necessary and (just) sufficient – the Minima-family-resemblance is clear.

Minima Twig looks totally different – while the box-shape is the same as the rest of the series, the pieces (once again all dominoes) have steel twigs sprouting out from either an end or a side and there are a number of slots and holes in the box that seem to be far more about the twigs than about facilitating rotations… this one’s different!

This time you’ve clearly got two types of pieces and it looks as though you’re going to need to get a twig protruding from every hole or slot in the box… he wouldn’t give you an extra hole or two, would he?

Experimenting to try an find which piece can use which holes is quite fun… don’t be tempted to assume you’ve found all the different ways of using those holes and slots until you’ve actually solved the puzzle – keep an open mind!

Start putting pieces in and you quickly find yourself back in familiar Minima-territory - the order of assembly is critical, even with just two types of pieces. The solution path might not be as complex as some of the earlier Minima, but the A-Ha’s along the way are just as pleasant.  

Definitely a worthy addition to the canon – and clearly the funkiest looking one so far… lovely work by Tye on a super design from Frederic.

I’m definitely keeping an eye out for any new designs in this series.

MPP LCI

[Thanks Tyler for the improved Roman Numerals!]

I collected the Gill and the Dutch contingent (Wil, Rob K and Louis) from the airport and we headed back to the house for some re-acquainting and some puzzling before the pizza’s came out of the oven and the puzzles disappeared while the pizzas were nommed… in relative silence. After the pizzas there were ice creams and then the puzzling resumed.

Will had gifted me a new puzzle box from JCC with some lovely intricate decoration and a prominent heart on the top… it was clear that it would have something to do with the solution, but it stubbornly resisted any attempts at getting it to do anything interesting… for quite a long time. Finally I found something potentially useful to explore before making a bit of progress, but it still took a while for me to stumble across the right thing and open the box to find a very compact mechanism housed inside the lid of the box – very neatly designed giving the right amount of puzzling and leaving plenty of space for the obligatory loaves of bread.

I’d printed a couple of copies of Mowens’ Paino Box for folks to have a bash at and Louis duly spent a while dismantling one copy entirely… stopping and starting it a couple of times as there’s a really sneaky bit after the first five or six pieces. Once he’d bashed through that wall, the rest yielded appropriately. He spent a while admiring the design of a number of the pieces (they really are intricate!) before working through the reassembly, occasionally stopping to reverse a few steps and insert a piece that should already be in there already… judging by Louis’ reaction it works quite well as either an assembly or a disassembly puzzle.

After some coffees and plenty of puzzling, I dropped the guys at their AirBnB and went home to crash.

Next morning I got all my stuff together and collected the boys on the way to the hall to get set up. Chris was already there and the Brass Monkey mobile with Mike and Rich in tow arrived just as we got there… Sam and Dale were having a chat in the carpark – great to see Sam again after quite a long break. It’s great to arrive and find a bunch of friends already there keen to get puzzling and chatting.

I left the lads setting up the tables and chairs while I headed off to grab some cold drinks and some fresh milk and by the time I got back I could tell which tables Steve had set up: there was a neat square of tables around the edge and two tables pushed together at a jaunty angle in the centre.

I’d taken along Planet with a Ring I & II for folks to compare (and more likely contrast!) and several folks seemed to enjoy them over the course of the day.

Having recently received a copy of Loris, I decided to take all of my Frank Chambers puzzles out for a play too and they seemed to go down very well indeed, albeit I don’t think I actually saw anyone solve Loris… let me know if I’m wrong! Ring Box raised a LOT of laughs, with almost everyone solving it under the table for some reason and some folks having something to say about certain others' enthusiastic resetting techniques. If you know, you know…

I had a lot of fun toying with Rich while he tried to solve Peter Hajek’s Matchbox – if only he’d just asked the question he wanted to, somebody would have given him an honest answer! (Probably…)

Juno’s Tetracircles got quite a lot of interest. Rob had made short work of both sides the night before and during the course of Saturday several more declared victory over it… leaving me gently sobbing as I haven’t managed either side in what seems like ages… one of these days!

Fraser brought along his own twist on Kohno Ichiro’s Three Cubes puzzle… with articulating pieces which adds another few degrees of freedom and a whole lot more puzzling. He was dishing out copies left, right and centre and I suspect that everyone ended up with their own copy – thanks Fraser!

[I won’t bore you with yet another description of the pig rolls, but they were good!]

Kyle had brought along a prototype for the new MW Puzzles pinball machine that’s been teased on Discord a bit… I think some folks made a little bit of progress, but I got absolutely nowhere – saving all the joy in the hopes of managing to grab a copy for myself at some point… it looks absolutely brilliant in real life.

Phil had brought along a few copies of his new version of Spinning Tumblers (v2) so I gave the man some cash and put a copy aside to play with later… when later came (on Sunday) it thoroughly kicked my R’s – and I have yet to make much meaningful progress… when I do manage to solve it, I’m sure you’ll hear about it!

Jesse’s Fibonacci box got a fair amount of interest, albeit given the indeterminate state it’d spent most of its time in, nobody managed to open it, until Sunday when Louis sat down with a sheet of paper and drew an exhaustive map of all of the states it can be in, and from that we determined the start and end positions and the all-important numbering system, which gives it its Fibonacci-ness – albeit only after I managed to seriously confuse things by being absolutely certain about the start of the series, only to find out I was wrong after Louis’ map suggested otherwise and the internet confirmed I was being a numpty.

Wil was selling a few interesting goodies including his latest exchange puzzle, copies of the EPP booklets, JCC’s new Heart Box and a really interesting new Indian-style puzzle lock. I’d managed to solve the lock the night before but during the course of the day I convinced myself I needed to add a copy to the hoard: it looks really familiar and indeed some elements work the way you might expect, but there’s a wonderful twist that puts a smile on everyone’s face when they find it…

Predictably we decamped and there were fish suppers and a bunch more puzzling at my place – and even some attempts at dexterity, but it might have been too late in the day for that… there was a lot of chat – some it puzzling, before everyone headed their own separate ways and I dropped the Dutch folks back at their home from home.

Next morning I collected them after breakfast and we puzzled furiously (I’ve already told you about Louis’ proper go at the Fibonacci box), I had a play with the Criss Cross Cube that Rob had given me on Friday evening and managed to work through a fair chunk of the simpler challenges before the harder challenges slowed me down quite a lot. I suspect the wizard levels are going to keep me amused for quite a while.

I spent a while on Phil’s latest toy, not getting very far at all – that one is going to take a bit more Think (c) and probably a bit of Listen (not c) as well.

Gill cooked us some gourmet hotdogs for lunch that went down very well before I dropped the lads off at BHX for their flight back to AMS… another excellently puzzling weekend – thanks to all who joined us and provided amusement.

 

A horse with a warrior

The fist time A horse with a warrior came up for sale I missed out in the lottery, so when the Karakuri-clan announced they’d be making another batch I tried again and managed to snaffle one the second time around.

 
This little guy is very much a statement piece - somewhat larger than your average Karakuri creation - it’s very obviously meant to be a Trojan beast of burden. 

While it’s clearly a horse, it’s definitely not so much of a horse that it’s lost its Trojan roots - those remain very clearly visible… and when you start playing with it there are several nods to that nature along the way. 

Kasho-San has introduced a number of wonderfully playful elements into the solve to remind you of the mythology, and possibly even nudge you along in the right direction. 

There are several pleasing steps along the solve, one or two surprises along the way and some really cool puzzle elements… and just in case you think you’re prematurely finished, there are one or two hints (including  a window into the beast’s soul and it’s very name!) to keep you going until you finally finish this solve… remember that if you haven’t found the hanko yet, you aren’t done…

MiBinity I

 ….when your mate drops you an email and tells you he’s designed a three-piece burr with a level 25 solution, you do the right thing and say “Yes, please. How much is it?” 

Then you wait patiently for a travelling puzzler to hand deliver it and confirm your instincts are good: Jack’s done a stunning job of bringing Michel’s design to life.

Front and back have Michel’s logo nicely laid out in walnut - handily giving the bones of the three pieces - which start coming apart in a nice rhythmic fashion as you begin the solve. 

Given the designer and the name of the puzzle, there are plenty of clues to the n-ary nature of this little guy, and it doesn’t disappoint. You’ll find yourself traversing a predictable pathway before having to go back on yourself before you can finally escape. 

Take the pieces apart and the interacting pathways are clear… and while disassembly is fairly straight-forward, in a Belgian sense, I found establishing the proper starting position to be the real puzzle! (It’s probably just me…!) 

Reassembled once more it looks great - and really doesn’t look like a flat three-piece level 25 burr.

Nice one chaps!!

Unsafe Deposit

<Excuse the short hiatus - we’ve been exploring Fort Lauderdale and enjoying some Caribbean sunshine! Blogging came second…>

I’ve written about Alan Lunsford’s little sequential discovery puzzles in the past- but until recently I hadn’t been able to get hold of a copy of his Unsafe Deposit as it usually contains a small bunch of coins and come countries are a little sniffy about folks posting their currency around the world…

In a bid to get his puzzles out to a wider audience, Alan has come up with an international-postage-friendly-version, which from my attempts to reintroduce some coinage after I’d solved it, suggest that he hasn’t just replaced the coins with 3D-printed tokens, he’s also taken the opportunity to change the design up a little…

Unsafe Deposit is about the same size as the previous two little guys I wrote about - there’s a pretty clear goal staring at you through a square window in the one side, a few slots and holes spread around a few of the other sides, and a hex screw blocking one of the slots that may have some treasure hiding inside it…

At the start, there appears to be very little that you can do - I spent quite a while totally convinced there was literally nothing I could do, until I summoned up the courage to do what I thought I shouldn’t… and it turned out I actually should very much have… so I was off…

As you progress you’ll find treasure or tools, you decide… there was a lovely flow to this solve early on, until there wasn’t and I found myself with a proverbial brick wall that wouldn’t budge. (I did take some comfort from seeing one or two other puzzlers at least temporarily halted by that particular stage - it’s a delightful change of gear, as it were and forces you to think(c) just a little more…) 

Once that hurdle is overcome it’s a short sprint to the finish line and retrieving that coin/token that’s been waiting patiently for you all along. 

Once again, there’s a lot going on inside this little cube, and I really love the fact that you think you know exactly what to do, until Alan throws a monkey wrench in your path and stops you dead… definitely one to toss at fellow puzzlers with a “Here, you’ll like this one…”

Minima Series (#1-12)

This week, dear reader (for there can surely only be one!) I bring you thoughts on a most excellent little set of puzzles – the Minima Series, designed by Frederic Boucher and made by NothingYetDesigns.

I missed out on these when they were initially put up for sale (in my defence they didn’t last long!) so I was very chuffed when I spotted a set on Puzzle Paradise at a reasonable price. One or two of my puzzling mates had said some encouraging things about them so I was intrigued.

NYD have done a great job of making up the boxes in frosted acrylic – all neatly marked with their appropriate identifiers. The pieces are all in their own little drawstring bags and there’s an instruction card for each of the dozen little terrors. Most of the instructions just ask you to place all of the pieces inside the box and remind you that rotations are allowed. (A couple of the later puzzles impose some restrictions on where certain coloured blocks need to be placed.)

Diving right in, I figured I’d start at number one because, clearly, that would be the easiest one, right?

M1 has just three pieces to be placed inside the 2*2*3 box (the boxes are all 2*2*3 – it’s just the openings that differ between them) – the pieces take up 11 voxels so we have one spare voxel inside the box when we’re done… given the shape of the openings, there’s literally only one place those pieces can be inserted, sure there are a couple of places where a bit can be temporarily parked outside the box, but they’re all going in through that single little opening…

I end up spending some time thinking (literally) outside the box while exploring the different assemblies that might fit inside the box, and then trying to reverse pieces out of the way using the imaginary holes in the right places… that doesn’t immediately lead to a suitable solution so I go back inside the box and begin exploring all of the potential rotations that might be possible with that combination of holes… and then some pennies start dropping… and M1’s solved.

A brief break to enjoy a little dopamine hit (hey, I’ve got to take all I can get, this solving thing doesn’t happen that frequently!) and I’m onto M2…

I make steady, albeit slow progress until I get to M4 which proves to be a bit of a blocker for me… but that’s nothing like M8, it turns out – that one keeps me thoroughly stumped for a long time – and it remains the only one in the series that I haven’t solved for weeks.

You’d think things might get a little samey after the first half dozen or so – but they don’t – Frederic’s put together an excellent set of challenges that never gets predictable – to the point that going back to the start again a week or two after you’ve solved the lot of them will still provide some amusement – and in my case – another serious challenge.

I really love this set of puzzles, and so far, everyone I’ve inflicted them on has had the same reaction: “How the heck can this simple little thing be that difficult?”