Puzzling Times

A couple of weeks ago I got to enjoy a wonderfully indulgent weekend away puzzling… Wil Strijbos has an annual open-house / puzzle party on or around the Netherlands'King’s Day holiday. It’s an opportunity for his friends from all around Europe to meet up, play with his puzzles and perhaps even purchase one or two things from the man himself.

I’ve missed the last couple of them due to having other things on those weekends, but this year I was determined to make it back so I booked the weekend out ages in advance and as soon as Wil confirmed the date I booked flights and a hotel so I had no excuse not to be there…

This year we managed to convince a couple of other MPP-ers to traipse along as well: Steve and Shane flew into Eindhoven on the Saturday morning and I joined them there in the afternoon via Schipol and the extremely efficient Dutch train system. Louis met me at the train station (I managed to find my way that far!) and we got me checked in at the local Holiday Inn where Shane and Steve had also just checked in. Louis took us back to his place for some gentle afternoon puzzling before Mieke filled us up with a delicious dinner.

Things took a serious turn after dinner when we all marched down the road to attempt a room escape at the Eindhoven Escape Hunt Experience which had recently opened up just around the corner from the Coolens… pure chance, eh?

Mieke and Laura joined the slightly more hardened puzzlers and we had a great time escaping from the Cosmology of Life room… I say escaping, and we did get out, with plenty time to spare, but we managed to do it without solving a few of the puzzles in the room – you see, we had Shane with us… and when Shane sees a combination lock, he sees it as a lock-picking challenge, so he motored through a whole bunch of them and we had a hard time keeping track of which combinations we’d used by the time we got to the end of the solve… and of course the final two locks were high quality locks that were a lot harder to pick so we actually had to solve those puzzles properly! [There was a fun version of Rush Hour where you needed to use a magnet to move the cars around…]

A couple more hours puzzling at the Coolens before we decamped back to the hotel to crash ahead of a full day on Sunday…

Louis collected us from the hotel and we headed cross-country to Venlo where we surprised Wil as he was trying to finish his breakfast – the English are keen, and early, it seems! Ushered in, he soon had us coffeed up, relaxed and puzzling in his lounge… among a mythical collection of fabulously rare puzzles… heaven.

And then the other puzzlers began arriving, and it was wonderful catching up with old friends I hadn’t seen for a while, and meeting people I’d only swapped emails with for the first time… I’d only been there half an hour and already it was all worth it! Just brilliant!

Michel was one of the first to arrive and I found myself sitting on the floor while a few of us played with his new copy of Jack Krijnen’s modified version of Goh Pit Khiam’s Racktangle – with added n-ary-ness… quite a treat.

Later on I had a chance to meet Jacques Haubrich who runs some rather nice puzzle auctions from time to time… no prizes for guessing how we know each other! After exchanging emails for ages it was great to meet Jacques and chat puzzles for a while at Wil’s.

Oskar set up a large table-full of puzzles and experiments out in the back garden under a lovely sunny sky and he had a solid progression of puzzlers passing around the table fiddling and playing and taking a few copies of his latest Hanayama puzzle off his hands…

As you might expect, there were a few prototypes of future Strijbos originals lying around and occasionally getting played with – sadly I was not allowed to buy any of them! (Yes, I tried!) There are some more cracking puzzles to come from this man in the near future… watch this space.

As usual Wil laid on an incredible spread of local delights for lunch – with a huge variety of wonderful tarts and cakes on offer pretty much all through the day…

At one point Louis stumbled across a set of insanely challenging dexterity puzzles and promptly lined them all up and solved the lot of them in short order…

Wil had an absolute hoot demonstrating his tricky sewing box with randomly locking and unlocking drawers much to everyone’s amusement – even trying unsuccessfully to GIVE it away a few times… before bringing out a lovely Japanese puzzle chest that Rik and his kids spent a while working their way through… it’s always nice seeing a couple of generations from the same family working on a puzzle collaboratively!

I managed to bag a couple of large-scale simple disentanglements to add to my collection and one of my mates managed to score an arboreal herbivorous marsupial - he was mighty chuffed, let me tell you!

When all was said and done and most folks had left a bunch of us decamped off to Wil’s favourite Chinese restaurant for a serious banquet of a dinner… and then a few more hours puzzling back at Wil’s place before Louis drove us all back to Eindhoven after a seriously long day’s puzzling… it all made for a brilliant puzzling weekend – thanks Wil, and Louis!

A couple of years ago Kagen Sound (nee Schaefer) announced an ambitious series of puzzle boxes starting with the Lotus Box. Each would be based on the geometry of his fabulous Lotus Tables and puzzlers would find clues to subsequent boxes along the way… it sounded like fun and the prototypes looked smashing so I signed up. As did, I suspect, another 99 other folks.

Over the course of the next two years Kagen would send out the occasional update and post some teasing pics showing bits and pieces of progress (generally piles and piles of gorgeous looking bits!) – until about a month ago when he announced that he was ready to start shipping his Lotus Boxes… I sent him some Paypal and pretty soon a rather large box arrived at Puzzling Times HQ – after the obligatory ransom demand had been paid, of course.

Opening that box was an absolute treat… inside there was a custom-made shipping box made out of MDF and some heavy cardboard tube… opening the lid of the shipping box revealed a very well wrapped Lotus Box… every bit as beautiful as Kagen’s pics had suggested.

As with all of Kagen’s boxes, the finish is thoroughly wonderful! This thing glistens in the light and feels gorgeous – and the eight(!) concentric rings all move smoothly between their individual end stops. It’s worth just playing around with those rings for a while before you start any serious puzzling – the patterns they create are stupendous – switching radically between patterns with a few small movements on some of the disks. This thing’s trippy!

So what’s it like as a puzzle then?

Short answer: terrific!

The slightly longer version: there are four drawers to be unlocked sequentially – each drawer’s locking mechanism relies on the puzzlist lining up those eight rings to form a pre-determined pattern… there’s a clue to the first pattern on the outside of the box and once that’s been properly created, the first drawer is unlocked… which gives a clue to the second pattern and so on…

I was able to create patterns one and two reasonably easily, but the third one eluded me for ages… and judging by the comments on my favourite puzzling forum, it’s caused similar levels of puzzlement in others too… it’s easy to get it almost right, then find that you can’t move one of the critical rings far enough to complete the pattern, so you shift things around a bit only to find another one blocked somewhere else – except, when you now unblock that one, the first one blocks up again… repeat.

I spent a while chasing my tail on that one before I finally found a way around it…

…and then there’s the small matter of finding the pattern for the final drawer… that’s a lovely little twist that might just keep you confused for a little while longer – it’s a lovely little touch… suckers you into a pattern and then break it when you need it the most!

I really enjoyed working my way through opening all four drawers after a particularly heavy day in the office, as a result I can confidently recommend the Lotus Box as a great antidote to the daily grind!

I’d had a pretty rubbish week so I’d been looking forward to heading down to James’ for a while – and not even the extra two and a half hours in the car (apparently every single caravan in the country was heading to Devon on that particular Saturday morning!) on the trip down managed to put a damper on things… James’ annual Puzzle Museum Puzzle Parties are brilliant!

There’s usually a wonderfully disparate bunch roaming the grounds during the course of the day, from mathematicians to puzzlers to jugglers – and even the (very!) odd magician.

Given all the traffic I arrived a few hours later than anticipated and found quite a few familiar faces already playing and puzzling – wee Steve had set up shop at the one end of the long table in the main puzzle room and after looking at his first batch of Nutty Bolts (#1) neatly packed in the box, I helped myself to a copy (and yes, I sent him some PayPal afterwards!) … several folks spent a while experimenting with the merchandise and I was a little amused to see some folks pick up a bolt and try to solve it, then swap it for another in the box and try that one instead… generally with not much more luck, but, hey, you never know…

I’d taken my copy of Jane Kostick’s delightful little packing puzzle that I’ve written about before and managed to entice Duncan into having another bash at it… along with one or two others – although sadly I don’t think anyone managed to find the incredibly satisfying elegant solution that puts twelve oddly shaped (identical) sticks and a cube inside the cubic interior of the triacontahedron box… pity!

I also managed to taunt one or two folks with my copy of Jane's “Phive” puzzle – I’ll never tire of seeing people’s faces when you show them the completed puzzle and then tip the pieces out into their hands – the pieces are really not what you expect them to be and sadly nobody conquered that one either during the course of the day…

As usual James and Lindsey had put on a fabulous spread for lunch – one of very few things that will draw a puzzler away from the puzzle room, let me tell you.

Sometime after lunch James herded everyone outside with the promise of some bangs, courtesy of wee Steve who blows things up as part of his day job (don’t ask!). We all formed a not so orderly line up against the edge of the garden and stared and some distant little green blobs in a small clearing in the field next door… turned out the little green blobs were watermelons (not so little after all!) and one of them had a small charge inside it connected to Steve’s wonderfully theatrical plunger box – which was ceremonially plunged sending one of the watermelons instantly into several thousand tiny pieces all heading skywards with a loud bang!

Thanks to Steve’s prep and favourable winds, nothing rained down upon the assembled masses and the only by-product was that the cows in the field next door decided it might be worthwhile wandering off into the distance. Steve reloaded with the second watermelon and it too was dispatched heavenwards in about a million little pieces.

I’d also taken along my copy of Johan Heyns appropriately named 4L Co-Mo DD (because it’s a 4-layered co-ordinate motion puzzle, with double difficulty – and he’s not kidding!) – it looks brilliant on its stand and folks couldn’t resist playing around with it – of course once it comes apart, it’s an absolute sod to get back together again because there are two sets of rings to align perfectly between the three pieces, on both sides – or nothing goes together… strangely nobody managed to reassemble it all day!

A while later James brought out his second-most-dangerous-kids-toy-in-the-world (second only to the chemistry set with actual uranium in it! And no, we didn’t play with that.) – the Austin Magic Pistol. The instructions for the pistol were duly read out for the assembled masses – with James interpreting along the way – place some magic crystals into the chamber was broadly translated to shovel in some calcium carbide – introduce a drop or two of water – yeah, we’re not going to stick to just a drop, are we? Screw the cap on the chamber, place a ping pong ball in the barrel, wait a few seconds and then pull the trigger – ball fires out with a pop… because the calcium carbide reacts with the water to produce acetylene gas (the stuff they weld with!), which the trigger mechanism ignites – what could go wrong?!

Big Steve was teed up to fire the monster and had us in stitches as he got progressively more and more adventurous with his attempts to fire the thing. At first there were pleasant pops with the balls flying several metres – until we eventually had loud bangs and flames coming out of the barrel – and it will take a long time to forget the sight of Steve peering down the barrel with flames coming out of it and then calmly blowing the fire out, while the chemical reaction was clearly still going on inside the chamber… Steve, you’re a nutter!

After the excitement with the pop gun, Laurie entertained us all with a short magic show that had most of us thoroughly flummoxed. All was well out on the veranda watching the magic show until the heavens opened and we had to high-tail it indoors to avoid getting soaked! Thanks Laurie!

During the course of the afternoon, I managed to thoroughly humiliate myself with a couple of burrs that James suggested I would like – and I did like them, I just failed thoroughly at the solving part! At one point Big Steve and I convinced ourselves that rotations HAD to be required for a particular burr… starting from the (imagined) solved position, we’d established that there was no way that it could be disassembled without some form of chicanery – or at least the suspension of one or two basic laws of nature. We kept coming back to it between other bits and pieces but couldn’t get anywhere, so eventually I asked James for the solution (yes, such things do exist!) and sure enough no chicanery or even rotations were required – just a rather neat if unconventional way of assembling the pieces. I’d been thoroughly caught out by this de Vreugd beauty!

Several folks had brought along freebies to hand out to the other attendees and during the week that followed I had a great time folding up a few playing cards to assemble one of Tim Rowett’s Sunken Cube Octahedrons – just four cards with few folds on each – and a little bit of fiddling to get them all properly interlocked – great therapy for the hands and mind!

Donald Bell had sent along a puzzle for everyone in spite of not even being able to attend! He’s produced another fiendishly difficult symmetry puzzle using three “Hook” Hexiamond shapes… at least it wasn’t quite as hard as the previous one he’d dished out! (Thanks Donald!)

Gerard and few others had a grand old time working their way through James'“Birthday Cabinet” trying to find all of the hidden compartments scattered around this seemingly innocent looking cabinet…

Somewhere around 7pm I decided I should probably head northwards and spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes saying good bye to everyone… before I loaded up the car and played my own little game of solo Rush Hour to get my car turned around and headed back up the track… except it had rained quite a bit after Laurie’s rain dance and I had a merry old time trying to do a three-point turn on James’ wonderfully steep track – until I relented and turned around inside his yard at the bottom of the hill… the rest of the drive home was pretty uneventful… :-)

A brilliant end to a rubbish week – all thanks to James and Lindsey for hosting us, and the rest of the gang for the usual wonderful camaraderie and banter…

Toward the end of 2008 Robert Yarger made a run of 31 little round puzzleboxes – number 18 in his series of numbered designs, it was dubbed the Sphere Box.

Upon first inspection, it looks like a ball trapped inside a wooden cage – so your first instincts might be to try and release the ball from the cage… and that would probably be useful, except the cage is pretty snug around the ball… and the ball has a few pins protruding from its surface which tend to get in the way of manipulating the ball around inside the frame…

Hmmmm…

OK, so let’s look at this object in a little more detail: the frame appears to be built up of two layers of wood bonded at right angles – and reading Rob’s notes on the puzzle over here,that was deliberate to add strength – to the point where it was “so sturdy it can practically be stood upon” – and No, dear reader, I am not tempted to test that in any way, shape or form – I can vouch that the frame is pretty sturdy and will certainly withstand an enthusiastic puzzler’s handling.

A couple of the rings on the cage have notches in them that look like they’ll allow those pesky pins on the ball through them – which is great, but there are only two of those notches – and there are three pins, so even if you line things up neatly, you still find a pin getting in the way somewhere…

As you might expect with one of Rob’s little beauties, not all is as it seems initially, and there are a few features to be discovered that will assist in freeing the trapped ball… although it takes quite a bit of manipulation and understanding of all the “features”, and sometimes exploiting them in unusual ways – do all that and you’ll be rewarded with being able to release the trapped ball – which turns out to be in two halves – with Rob’s trademark little Stickman logo inside it.

It looks unique – I’m pretty certain that you’d be hard-pressed to name another puzzlebox in the shape of a ball trapped in a cage – and if you could, I’d wager a lot that it wouldn’t be nearly as good-looking as this little gem.

You can read Neil’s thoughts, and even see a video of the puzzle in action (with some spoilers), over here.

Wil Strijbos’ latest sequential discovery puzzle has been in the works for a while – it’s been prototyped, it’s been tested and it’s finally been perfected – and a couple of weeks ago it was unleashed on a community eager to be puzzled.

Several painful seconds elapsed between receiving the email announcing the new puzzle and my sending the reply asking to be puzzled… and a couple of days later a friendly delivery man (yes, they do exist!) deposited a rather heavy box at Puzzling Times HQ.

Sod’s Law dictates that on the first evening I only had enough time to remove it from its shipping box… admire the nice sturdy inner box, take it out and admire its shininess.

The next evening I did get to play though…

It’s a solid, handsome aluminium box, similar in size to Wil’s Angel Box– the obvious distinguisher is the sprung plunger sticking out the one side of the box – think Pinball launch-mechanism, or indeed, if you’re au fait with them, a Pachinko machine. There’s a little window on the side that allows a view of the plunger trapping a shiny marble against an internal wall in the box. On the top of the box there’s another window through which a Russian 2 Ruble coin is visible… there are one or two tiny holes around the box, a T-shaped slot on one side and a single round hole in the bottom of the box – which looks about marble-sized.

First order of business must surely be to play around with the marble and the plunger, so if you’re like me, you take a deep breath and release the marble and then immediately try and replace it back where it was, clamped in place by the plunger – if only so that you can convince yourself that you can get back there again if you find the need to… turns out that’s pretty trivial. So you may as well get a bit more adventurous…

Peering into that first little window I spotted a potential exit for the marble, although it seemed, rather unhelpfully, to have something rather severely in the way…

After a while I managed to navigate to another area and duly found the marble in my lap – that hole IS large enough it turns out… marble in one hand, (very locked-up) Pachinko Box in the other – what’s a bloke supposed to do? I’ve got the marble out, but Wil’s instructions were to remove the second coin – and so far I’ve only seen one coin. Clearly there is (a lot!) more to be discovered…

Gingerly the marble goes back into the hole it came out of – and immediately check you can remove it again (confirmed! Tick. Move on.) before peering through the slot and the hole to see if there’s anything else interesting looking in there… nada, at least there’s nothing to be seen… and now the real puzzling starts!

From there you’ll find a few tools and begin a wonderful little odyssey that slowly reveals the box’s innards – usually just a bit too late to actually be useful in solving that stage, but great to confirm what you thought you knew!

Toward the end of the journey you're rewarded with a wonderful Strijbos touch: a tantalising view of the second coin… you just can’t actually do anything about it until you solve a few more aspects of the puzzle.

It’s a really fun sequence of events that forces you to use your imagination and skills in some unusual ways – there’s a wonderful use of tools at one point that had me grinning like a Cheshire Cat – it is delightful.

By the time you remove the second coin, the box is pretty much laid bare… there’s only one little piece of the puzzle that you need to imagine as it remains blocked from view…

…and as a bonus, resetting the puzzle for the next victim is simple and quick!

Another great puzzling journey from Wil.

A while ago Johan posted some pics on FaceBook of his experiments with variations on a triangular coordinate motion puzzle – he’d come up with a fiendish variant that made similar variants in my collection look rather tame by comparison – and it looked rather stunning, so I gladly signed up for a copy of 4L Co-Mo DD – a rather descriptive name if you can crack the code! [It stands for 4-layer coordinate motion with double difficulty… it’s all clear when you’ve had it explained to you…]

When it’s assembled, it resembles a wheel with an internal ring and an outer rim – closer examination shows that there are four layers to each of those rings, and that they all split apart into three pieces… offset on each layer so that the three pieces form a rudimentary spiral. The basic concept is common to a few coordinate motion assemblies and part of the trick is realising how you need to push or pull the various bits in order to get them to start coming apart…

This little monster has a nasty sting in the tale – it starts out reasonably predictably for these sorts of puzzles, but then as things start coming apart, it goes beyond the point where the first set of interactions hold it neatly in place and it all goes very sloppy … before the second set of interactions begin to bite.

This leaves you with a floppy set of loosely connected - but very much still intertwined - pieces, and a serious challenge to get them all properly aligned and interacting in order to allow the bits to finally come apart – the double difficulty part of the name is well-deserved!

Persevere and you’re rewarded with three separate identical (save for the wood choices!) pieces.

Putting things back together will require a lot of precision and more than a little patience… and a flat surface certainly helps, in my experience – as does a third hand.

It’s a great extension of a reasonably well-known standard, but Johan’s added several lovely twists to make it a serious challenge for even practiced puzzlists… and the stand, that enables it to be displayed semi-open is a master-stroke that makes it display beautifully and invites the challenger.

Skitterend Oom!

Each year, just before Wimbledon starts, I try and entice Dick Hess into coming around for a day or two so that we can get the local puzzlists together for a gathering… he’s fallen for it a few times now… and last Friday I took the day off work so that I could collect him from the station and spend the day chatting about puzzles and tennis and life in general… Gill and I had a great day with him – and that evening we collected Louis from the airport which could only mean one thing: an MPP was in the offing... and sure enough, next morning the puzzlists descended on Puzzling Times HQ.

MPP XXiii!

Gill left early on the Saturday morning to attend a workshop a friend was running in Alcester, leaving me to ready the house for the impending arrivals.

I’d unwittingly arranged a bit of a test for the arriving puzzlists in the form of some major roadworks in our street that resulted in almost everyone having to negotiate some interesting detours, and then negotiate with a surly construction worker to allow them safe passage past the obstruction he was manning with strict orders to keep them out… they all made it through.

Apart form his usual mathematical challenges, Dick had carefully prepared a number of new puzzles to dish out to everyone – after last year’s Four Keys puzzle (which I’d done 90% of and needed Dick to restore the final key for me!) he brought us the Five Keys puzzle – consisting of – you guessed it – 5 differently shaped keys trapped on a trapeze – so far I’ve looked at it, confirmed that all five keys are currently attached and taken a pic of the solved state… and sometime in the next few days I shall embarrass myself by attempting to remove and replace the keys… it only took me the best part of a year last time… Thank you, Dick!

Shane had brought along a couple of prototype lock puzzles that several of us had a go at – and without exception, we were encouraging him to manufacture them and inflict them on a wider audience.

Oli presented everyone with a 2 pence version of the obloid wobbler and they were duly rolled around to much amusement... cheers Oli!

Big Steve had brought along copies of a Wimbledon-themed Coffin-like 3D-printed puzzle for everyone – a lovely idea and rather generous of him… I didn’t get a chance to play with it until the following day and it’s a great variation on a theme that makes for a really interesting little puzzle: six identically-shaped pieces in three colours fit together to make a neat little rhombic dodecahedron – Thanks Steve!

James had brought along a couple of challenges for us all: a copy of the World’s Fair Prize Puzzle from 1891 confounded everyone, as it had done at our last PMPP, but several folks had a lot more success tackling his yoghurt pot challenge to assemble 6 pots into a three dimensional cross shape in such a way that it holds together of its own accord. I saw several complete structures and also witnessed a number of sheepish looks when a passer-by picked up one that someone else had assembled, only to have it fall apart in their hands… some of the advanced challenges with smaller pots and other sorts of plastic lids didn’t meet with as much success, so we decided they were probably impossible!

Lunch consisted of several pizzas, a couple of quiches and even some salad – can you tell that Gill had organised the food and not me? Oh, and the ice cream and choccy sauce went down quite well afterwards.

I’d left out my copy of Pavel’s Edgewise for folks to solve for me (having failed abysmally on my last holiday to do so myself). A couple of folks, led by Chris duly had a stab at it and found some really interesting “features” – but couldn’t quite crack it … although later that evening when everyone had wandered off in their respective directions, Louis and I had another bash at it and ended up actually managing to solve its multi-layered challenges – tremendous sense of satisfaction, almost smugness, ensued.

A couple of copies of Wil’s new Pachinko box were in evidence and a few guys who hadn’t bought one managed to have a go at solving them… and I think that Oli managed to get all the way through it – well done that man!

Somewhere around mid-afternoon I had to run Dick back to the station so he could get back to Wimbledon in time for his dinner date, so I put Ben in charge and left the puzzlers at it… and when I got back from the station, somewhat drenched from the superbly ill-timed downpour that arrived just as I was escorting Dick into the station, everyone was still puzzling furiously – in fact, had I not told them I was going out for an hour, I suspect that none of them would have been any the wiser!

Simon entertained us with a set of rebuses (rebii!) that his daughter had created and several times you’d see a flash of recognition when someone was sounding out various words and suddenly they would join together to form the title of a well-know movie… good fun and rather well designed, and drawn, by Charlotte!

I did learn one very important lesson that day: NEVER. EVER. Tell puzzlers that a particular disentanglement requires a little force!

I’d left out an intertwined pair of C’s and mentioned that they were a bit stiff so a little force might be required… seems that form then on, anything was fair game and the resulting entanglement wasn’t untangled for the rest of the day… in fact it took Louis and I about half an hour, WITH A VICE, the following morning to encourage the unnaturally joined pieces apart … then we spent a little while tuning the pieces so that excess force would never again be required… probably serves me right for not doing that before they all arrived!

Another brilliant day's puzzling with good friends...

BTW did anyone, by any chance, end up with an extra copy of Dick's new book inscribed to me - I can't find it anywhere...

Two of ‘em!

From Jakub!

Brilliant!

I’d been a bit remiss in ordering things from Jakub at the new Pelikan Workshopfor a while and decided to remedy that a few weeks ago, and part of that order was a couple of balls…

First up was the Slideways Ball– beautifully presented on a golf tee perched on a little green (nice touch!) wooden base, complete with brass name plaque. Essentially it’s Ray Stanton’s Slideways cube that’s been Pelikan-ised, turning (!) it into a ball.

Having played with my copy of the cube, I understood the importance of getting the grip just right (or you’re pushing against yourself and going absolutely nowhere!). And it took me a long time to get the cube apart – in fact I had to rope in my Dutch super-solver at one point because it was so stiff that I thought it had got itself gummed up somehow – it had, a bit. Or at least that’s my story…

So when I started playing with the ball I was very careful about how I held it and which way I pushed / slid things… and that helped as I managed to stumble upon the correct grip a few times – but once it’s all back together again, there is literally no clue to where the seams will emerge – beautifully made!

Next we have the multi-coloured Mochalov Ball– this puzzle started out life as the standard Mochalov cube #8 – which is an interesting assembly of 8 identical pieces that form a solid cube. The design’s been altered a little to make assembly and disassembly a bit more “interesting” – and forcing a sequential assembly where the original cube allowed you to pretty much start almost anywhere.

Again, there’s the Pelikan-ising to produce a beautiful ball in mixed hardwoods. Looks lovely!

I spent ages poking and prodding and tugging at various bits of the ball until I finally found the key-piece and pulled it free… you really do need to tip your hat to the brilliant craftsmanship that produces a perfectly round puzzle with virtually no clues to where the first piece will come free.

Once the first piece is out, you can deduce which pieces should be able to move next and progress sensibly until you’re left with a pile of interesting variations on the same basic piece-shape… which will force you to retrace your steps and reassemble everything in the same order, pretty much… stunning craftsmanship being sold at ridiculously good prices… well worth adding to your collection if you haven’t already got them!

[Let’s see what sort of weird traffic Google sends to my site this time!]

Several of my puzzling mates have been talking about Radek Micopulos’ hedgehog shop and I’d been meaning to get off my backside and put in an order for a while, and then a few weeks ago Oli brought around a couple of examples of Radek’s work and a few days later I’d put in my order – they look really good in the flesh!

Radek’s website has a bunch of interesting information about hedgehog puzzles in general, and if you speech Czech, it has a great little shop – now Google Translate will help you understand what’s in there and get a feel for the prices, but when you try placing an order, there’s no way to give it an address outside of the Czech Republic – which is a bit of blow if you happen to live in a village in England… a short email to Radek introducing myself and asking about the ordering process soon had me agreeing an order and sending across some PayPal… which of course arrived just as Radek was about to head out on a two-week holiday – but just over two weeks later, a delightful little package arrived in the Midlands countryside.

The Hedgehog Shop (not its real name, but I can’t resist, even if only to broaden the puzzles’ appeal to animal rights activists!!) has some wonderful variations on the theme – all of them really enticing and I ended up getting a few representative samples of the different sorts on offer, and I’m really glad I did… because when I say they’re variations on a theme – that probably puts them in too narrow a categorisation… :-)

Spikeroller / Torpedo

First up is probably widely known as a torpedo hedgehog although Radek's name of Spikeroller is probably more descriptive (you don’t often find torpedoes with spikey bits sticking out at odd angles, do you… do you?).

It’s a pretty well-known design that has been produced by stacks of other puzzle makers over the years… there is a standard solution that requires some careful observation and some wonderful manipulation in three dimensions – very satisfying stuff!

Original Hedgehog

As you might expect, Radek’s site has several variations on the standard spikey-ball-in-a-cage puzzle – I chose the fancy aluminium version that appears to have the cage spun from single piece of aluminium (very nice work) and a spikey-ball with a little secret inside it.

This version similarly relies on observation and manipulation, albeit with an added little surprise that when you extract the spikey-ball, you’ll find it unscrews and hides a copy of a set of plans for a flying bicycle… why? I haven’t the foggiest, but it’s a lovely little whimsical surprise… and it’s all very beautifully made!

Oh and the special versions come snugly in a velvet drawstring bag inside a neat, branded protective can. Nice touch!

Gen Hedgehog

Now this one’s a little different...

The first clue is in the spiral bars on the cage – then you’ll spot an interesting slot in one of the ends of the cage… and then notice that the end is double-layered and the inner layer has a number of oddly spaced slots in it as well…

Oh, and the ball has fewer spikes than you might be expecting…

Walk in the park?

Eh, no.

This one requires some thought and planning, and then a bunch of careful manipulation before you’re rewarded with a ball in one hand and a cage in t’other.

Lovely little sequence of moves in there…

Axis Hedgehog

If the Gen was a little different, this one’s from another (rather heavy-duty!) planet. Not only is the cage a much heavier affair, but each of the ends has an embedded (swivelling!) ball bearing race in it… giving it a brilliantly industrial look and feel – as well as a few extra little things to play with.

This one took me easily the longest to solve – I spent quite a while playing around with all the usual suspects on a puzzle like this and (enjoyably) got absolutely nowhere! The ball is clearly(!) too wide to get between the bars on the cage, and the spikes are too long to permit any sort of passage through or around the bearing races… so I decided that it was probably impossible – if only it weren't for that gnawing memory of a pic of Oli’s with the ball perched on top of the cage…

Having decided it was impossible, oddly, released me to imagine exactly how it could be solved – et voila!

Definitely a puzzler’s puzzle!

This one first showed up at an MPP quite a while ago and it amused many puzzlers that day… unfortunately one of them behaved in a totally inappropriate manner(!) and discovered a cooked solution that pretty much by-passed all of the cleverness… so Shane took it away and came up with an improved version, and duly presented me with a copy to add to my collection… Thanks!

Turn the Plug falls into Shane’s category of “Interval Puzzles” (like the “Wire cutter”) – which by his own description aren’t big and complicated enough to be included in his main puzzle series and are typically used to experiment with a particular idea or feature – although in my humble opinion (and that of several other puzzlers I know!) they’re plenty good enough as stand-alone puzzles!

Ostensibly Turn the Plug is a door lock mounted on a big old chunk of wood with a handy base so it stand upright. On the right hand side there’s a handy key … or at least it would have been handy if “someone” hadn’t screwed it firmly into said chunk of wood – and not provided any visible means of unscrewing it!

The rear of the puzzle reveals the aim, with a little indicator dial currently pointing to “Locked” with the puzzler being goaded into getting it to somehow point to “Open”.

Now it might not look like it, and Shane’s insistence on calling it an “interval” puzzle might lead you to believe otherwise, but this is a great little sequential discovery puzzle with a delightful discovery element to be, err, discovered.

Having discovered said thingy, finding how to use it effectively is 90% of the puzzle – let’s just say that Shane’s experience at locksmith mastery hasn’t gone to waste.

I love the fact that it all looks so simple and honest… when it’s anything but!

Nice job that man!

…for a puzzle party…

A couple of months ago I became aware that my Irish puzzling mate, Jim Kerley, was going to be over in the UK for a week or so, and he was going to be based in a village less than an hour from my place – so I made the traditional South African offer of “come around for some burnt meat and some puzzling”. (OK, one of those probably isn’t a traditional South African offer…)

We duly agreed on a suitable Saturday and invited a few other puzzlists around for the same – so last Saturday we had 10 for a braai and some puzzles, with Jim and Karen’s visit serving as a brilliant excuse!

Shane arrived first, arm in a sling because he was (“allegedly”) catching a Pokemon with his phone when he tripped over something on a building site, having expected traffic and there wasn’t much at all. We’d just about caught up when Joe arrived from Wales-shire, shortly followed by Chris, so we settled down with a coffee and put the world to rights before a car-load arrived from London – Ali, Steve and Michael – so the serious puzzling could begin… and it did, until Jim and Karen arrived and there were introductions a-plenty.

Steve was quick to bring out some 3D-printed wares, including a lovely multi-coloured copy of Coffin’s 12-Piece Separation – neatly assembled – which he duly gave me … and then I did something VERY STUPID INDEED – I suggested that he take it apart and give me the pieces… he grimaced a little (having assembled the darn thing for me in the first place!) and proceeded to reduce it to a pile of similar looking sticks – mainly double-ended crochet-hooks in fact… watching him struggle to take it apart left me reconsidering my rashness – except that by then it was too late… the bag of pieces was duly passed around to several puzzlers with Chris spending quite a long time on it after I’d singularly failed to reassemble it. Chris, knowing that he could solve it, as he has a couple of copies at home, spent ages putting together several almost assemblies and eventually left me with a 10-Piece Separation and a couple of spare pieces. (It took me a good few hours on Sunday before it was finally fully back together again!)

Steve had also brought along his copy of Brian Young’s latest sequential discovery odyssey, the SMS Box. My copy was also floating around and I watched in agony as both Chris and Ali duly made as much progress respectively as I have in the past month in less than an hour of playing around with them… which just goes to show quite how slow I am at solving these things! They had the good grace not to admit to any further progress beyond that stage at least…

Jim had brought along several copies of his recent exchange puzzles as well as a number of other tray-packing puzzles produced on his trusty laser cutter. They were soon being passed around and enjoyed – even solved in some cases – before Jim announced that they were gifts for the good puzzlers who’d come along to make it a puzzle party – cue much thanks and even happier puzzlers!
At some point during the afternoon Gill pointed out that everyone was getting hungry so we fired up the Weber and began burning random cuts of meat, while Gill brought out several rounds of garlic bread to sustain folks while the braai-master did his thing. While the ritual burning was going on Adin and Sophie popped in on their way to a better/former (delete as appropriate) offer. We managed to keep them just long enough for a cuppa, but they were heading off to Oxford for another BBQ so we couldn’t tempt them to stay with offers of burnt meat…

With all the meat suitably cooked, we sat down to a pretty darn good lunch (even if I say so myself) under the shade of the gazebo on the deck (not often we get to say that in Blighty!) – and it was good.

With the plates cleared from the table, the puzzles all miraculously reappeared and the puzzling restarted.

With the return of the anti-social puzzling silence, the girls decided to wander up to the woods with the hound in tow and made the most of the lovely weather with a walk in the woods – muchly enjoyed by Ben of course!

Shane and Joe worked their way through my little Corian collection, with everyone in the know having great fun with Shane while he solved my copy of Hajek’s Matchbox– with plenty of “Oooh”s and “I can’t believe he would do that to someone else’s puzzle!” at the appropriate moments.

Chris had brought along his copy of Cubloc and Ali spent a while getting it even further away from a solved position… until I explained how much “fun” I’d had with mine – firstly getting it apart (a major slog! From memory it’s about 49 moves for the first piece out!) and then trying to get it back together again – using BurrTools! This puzzle has a lot of pieces and I tried several unsuccessful strategies at finding a solution in BurrTools before I finally managed to come up with a cunning enough plan that my favourite software didn’t think was going to take months (or more!) to get through. Even then, the physical assembly is an absolute beast! Be warned…

When the girls got back from their walk we laid on some strawberries and ice cream with choccy sauce (brain food!) to top up the flagging energy levels – followed a while later with coffee and delicious cake from Mike… we did not go hungry!

Michael kept us entertained with some wonderful Robert Reid stories (mental note: must pick up a copy of their book!) and he and Jim spent ages chatting about tilings and dissections. Somehow the conversation turned to laser-cutting and the noxious fumes that can be generated before Chris and Jim set about comparing sizes – Chris won hands-down, although, in fairness to Jim, he was competing with an entire university lab! Things took a very surreal turn when Mike announced that igniting an acetone-drenched hand would leave you largely unharmed (or was it ether? – one of them was OK…), we didn’t feel the need to prove this, but it did provide a great excuse to trot out the story of Steve and the Austin Magic Pistol once more.

It was late-afternoon before Jim and Karen had to leave to visit some nearby family connections – and early evening by the time the (relative) locals decided they needed to head homewards… a good day’s puzzling (&) banter!

A while back Steve teased us at an MPP with a set of Nutty Bolts he’d made up – ostensibly they all looked pretty similar (aside from their distinguishing colourful name tags) and the aim was the same for each of them: remove the trapped washer.

Flash forward many months and Steve had a batch of 30 of them available for sale, first at James’ PMPPearlier this year, and then on his website… I picked up a copy at James’ place and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now.

It’s great! Get one.

Feel free to carry on reading if you’re the deeply distrustful sort…

Steve’s plans for the series are to produce a set of virtually identical-looking bolts, all of them with a pair of nuts and a washer on them where the aim is to release the washer… all with different mechanisms to perplex puzzlists.

Nutty bolt #1 is one of the simpler designs he showed us at MPP but it’s a cracker – while there have been similar mechanisms on puzzle bolts in the past, Steve’s bolts are beautifully machined and they behave impeccably… there is zero chance of anything catching unexpectedly or the mechanism not working perfectly every time. You won’t need to bang it or encourage it to do its thing, but having said that, it’s a solid four inch bolt so it will take pretty much any sort of abuse you can throw at it. When he says that every bolt has been finished by hand, he means it, and he’s proud of his work!

Nutty Bolt #1 has a really elegant locking mechanism that rewards thought and a delicate examination.

Solve it and everything is open to examination – and I’m certain you’ll agree it’s been neatly done….

Steve’s first batch of 30 #1’s sold out fairly quickly, but if you drop him a line via his website, he’ll keep a list of folks who want one and chances are he’ll be making another batch or two in the future.

Eric Fuller produced a bunch of these about 10 years ago… he’d intended to produce a slightly harder version of Stewart Coffin’s Slot Machine which ordinarily has a clear top to the box. That bit went as planned, but when it came to cutting the slot in the top of his boxes, he inadvertently cut them on the wrong side, so he ended up with a Reverse-Blind-Slot-Machine – although he settled on Blind Slot Machine in the end.

This design is a classic Coffin puzzle – it looks straight-forward: you have to put a series of polyominoes into the box through a slot in the top to make up a 3*3*3 cube inside the box. There are seven polyominoes and each of the pieces can fit through the slot(!). There are only so many ways to may up a cube from the pieces you’re given and the shape and position of the slot will dictate which pieces can go in last and in what orientation they would need to be in… which narrows things down quite a lot…

So pretty early on in the solving process you find yourself knowing exactly which assembly you’re targeting for the cube, which orientation it has to be in and which pieces are going in last – should be a doddle from there, eh?

Remember I said it was a classic Coffin puzzle?

Well, it is … which means that it’s anything but simple – even when you know EXACTLY what you’re trying to do… in fact in the beginning of the solution there is a sequence that is thoroughly mind-bending – so few combinations yet so thoroughly boggling! Several times I found myself going right back to basics, convinced I must have missed something somewhere because what I’m trying to do is quite simply impossible…

…and you’re doing everything by feel, remember? Feel and logic. Because there’s no little window to peer through and your finger is going to be jammed through that slot in the top of the box for quite a while…

Hugely satisfying solve when you finally manage to execute that tricky little bit – well worth putting all the remaining pieces in just so that you can say you have…

[Thanks to Gerard for offering this (my first ever!) guest blog post about a very special, unique puzzle... enjoy!]

This is, I believe, the first guest piece on Allard’s brilliant blog. So I feel special and I also have something quite special to talk about.

By way of introduction, I’m Gerard, a puzzle collector (mainly puzzle boxes though I tend to stray into buying other puzzles on occasions - much to the distress of my credit card!), and I often use puzzles in creative thinking workshops which I deliver. You can hear more about these workshops if you’re interested here.

First up, a bit of expectation management. The puzzle I’m about to describe is not available to purchase and was made strictly as a one-off. It will never be for sale as I’m never going to part with it. Given that it’s a one-off, there are a few spoilers below.

It was a gift made by Shane Hales, a relatively new burgeoning talent on the puzzle-making scene. Shane made it as a one-off and the look, approach and ideas were all his. Some more expectation management before we go on – I’m afraid that Shane doesn’t do commissions as he also has a full time job.

When Shane dropped me a line to say that the box was ready, to say I was pretty excited is a complete underestimate as I had heard rumours on the puzzle circuit that a lot of thought had gone into the box and Shane had teased a few people with some of his ideas. I had no real idea what to expect though was envisaging a typical small wooden puzzle box. We met in a café and following some pleasantries he passed over a large, beautiful, heavy, wooden box with an intriguing design. On the front was a locked hinged door with the words “Fairies keep out” scratched onto it.

The waitress in the café saw it and immediately said “Wow, that is so beautiful”. The people opposite us in the café stopped talking and stared both curiously and impressively at the box.

I was so taken aback by the box that I didn’t immediately twig that it had been made to complement Mike Toulouzas’ Fairy Door puzzle box. It was made with Mike’s blessing and has a bit of a ‘goblin’ feel about the design which makes it fun. Shane had the initial idea from the film ‘Beetlejuice’ a few years ago and then with Mike releasing the Fairy’s Door in 2015 it gave Shane the inspiration for the Goblin’s Door.

What was immediately very apparent was there was a huge amount of work put into the box and its creation and so I decided to take my time with it and spent the next few weeks exploring it, playing with it but mostly admiring it. In essence, it is a sequential discovery box combined with a few secret compartments and treasure to be discovered. All the things that I love about puzzle boxes brought into one.

The other thing I love to have is a solution. Ok, I know there are some members of the puzzle community out there reading this and putting me into the ‘feeble’ category of puzzle solving. That may be close to the truth but I have in the past broken bits of puzzles by forcing pieces that shouldn’t be forced or not solved them because whilst I thought that something needs to be yanked, I was just too afraid to do it in case it shouldn’t be and I end up breaking a piece. Shane obliged my request but rather than some hints written on a scrap of paper as I was expecting, he put together a comprehensive colour booklet giving step-by-step solutions with photographs to opening the Goblin’s Door. So whilst I might have a hunch that perhaps something pulls up or could be moved, before doing so I can check that I’m on the right lines and so avoiding potentially damaging anything. It meant that I could really enjoy the box and explore it with ease.

After some searching on the outside of the box, pretty soon I found some tools (though they were cleverly hidden) and then the first challenge – using them to pick a lock. There’s a sense of achievement in getting through this stage and opening the door – particularly if, like me, you’ve never picked a lock before (honest). But of course having got the door open, I realised it only opens so far with a chain preventing it and a creepy hand poking out (yes really!) to warn you of what lies within. So, another challenge to overcome – open the door fully – if you dare.

Once inside there is what I guess you might expect to find in a goblin’s home – an assortment of ghoulish items hanging up including a whip, a head of a goblin and oh, something that looks like a key – might be handy - need to get it but it’s screwed to the wall so must search for another tool. Each tool found has only one use and the steps are intuitive with one thing leading logically and creatively on to another.

More tools then need to be discovered as you explore the box, a mouse needs to be rescued, and the goblin’s hiding place revealed. Following a series of fun moves a back wall falls apart to reveal two excellent puzzles to play with: Robert Yarger’s Pirates Wallet Lock (very clever) and Luke Vandear’s Silver Eagle coin puzzle. I’ve never come across the latter before but suffice it to say it is amazing – a coin broken into tiny fragments of pieces that need to be put together like a jigsaw. Certainly something not to be done with bear hands.

The Goblin’s Door is a fun, highly enjoyable puzzling journey with lots of ‘aha’ moments and feelings of intrigue, achievement and discovery. It is also a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. It’s truly wonderful. My favourite aspects? Well the lock picking was especially fun (but rest assured I don’t think I will abandon the day job for a career in cracking safes just yet), the fact that getting the door open is only half the journey, and finding a mouse under some floor boards put a smile on my face.

Congratulations to Shane on a brilliant puzzle box and thanks Allard for letting me have this first guest review.

A few months ago I treated myself to a pair of puzzles from Lee Krasnow: a matching set of a Diagonal Burr and Coffin’s Pseudo-Notched Sticks… I’d loved the idea of getting a pair of these to have lying around to demonstrate to non-puzzlers that what-you-see isn’t necessarily what-you-get with puzzles – in fact sometimes those darn puzzle designers try and use that against you.
(Shock! Horror! No, we’ve never been caught out like that, have we?!)

The standard diagonal burr is made up of six identically notched sticks that slot together in a standard six-piece burr shape except that the sticks are all on the diagonal instead of being flat against one another… pulling any set of adjacent pieces apart will almost instantly reduce the assembled puzzle back to the pile of pieces it started out as – and assembly is only slightly tricky as it needs to be built in two sub-assemblies that are offered up at the end.

Pseudo-Notched Sticks is another animal altogether – designed to look exactly like its simpler brother (aka ole Notched Sticks) when it’s assembled, there is no hint of familial resemblance when looking at the unassembled pieces… and indeed the standard approach of gripping adjacent pieces and pulling them apart sideways won’t help you disassembling this guy at all, in fact you’ll be pulling against yourself all the way!

Lee’s set comes beautifully presented in his customised boxes, with woods neatly matched between the two puzzles so that they actually look pretty darn similar when they’re assembled next to each other. As you might expect with Lee, though, the matching goes a lot deeper than just choosing bits of similar wood… while the standard diagonal burr is normally made of single sticks with notches cut in them (can you tell where the name comes from yet?!) Lee’s copies have the sticks made up of three separate pieces, so that when you examine the two puzzles next to each other there’s no visual clue as to which of the sets is Pseudo and which isn’t… a thoroughly bonkers attention to detail that deserves calling out!

One of the little delights of having a perfectly made set of matching pieces is the ability to put together some Franken-puzzles combining bits of both sets – and still producing a set of matching puzzles… neat, eh?

Variations on a theme

Having just written about the standard Diagonal Burr, I should mention a couple of variations on the theme from Mr Puzzle that turn the simple puzzle into a somewhat less simple one…

First up is a Stuart Gee design called Diagonal Twins that mates a pair of Diagonal Burrs along a shared axis – although you’ll need to think about the axis a little… a few of the pieces are a little unusual but most of them are your standard common-or-garden notched sticks… the number of non-standard sticks gives a pretty good clue to how they’re going to be used, but I still found I needed to think things through to find the appropriate assembly.

Brian Young’s Insoma Burr takes things to an all new level of complexity, however. On the outside it might look a bit like a stylised diagonal burr, and it certainly comes apart like a diagonal burr, the insides are nothing like a standard diagonal burr… each of the main pieces has a piece of a Soma Cube attached to its centre, with the final piece (because a Soma cube has seven pieces) free to be placed in an appropriate place.

Now if you know your Soma cubes well you’ll know that there are 240 possible cube assemblies – however you’ll find that attaching them to the insides of a diagonal burr will restrict the number of achievable assemblies quite a lot – in fact it restricts them to a single solution… making this a very challenging somewhat distant relative of the standard Diagonal Burr…

Not to be taken lightly!

It was an early start for Gill and I on the Monday morning – so early that there wasn’t any traffic on the M42! We found ourselves queueing to check in behind the entire Shrewsbury Town football club (players, not supporters, he added hastily, in case they actually have supporters) – although once a few more check-in desks opened up, things moved quite quickly… giving us plenty of time for a coffee before the quick hop across to AMS… for a short layover during which we found the entire Luxembourg contingent waiting for the same flight to KIX. That was a long flight, with virtually no sleep, shortened a bit by a David Baldacci novel that was really cheap on the Kindle. It passed the time.

At Kansai International the puzzlers reassembled in the immigration queue before collecting our bags and heading for the Limousine Bus to Kyoto, where René stopped Gill and I from insisting on getting off the bus stop before the one right outside our hotel. We arrived too early to check in so Gill and I settled down in the hotel bar for a couple of hours over rosbif sandwiches and a couple of drinks while we watched some delighted little schoolkids being taught to make mocktails by the hotel bar staff for their parents and teachers… much happiness, even if there wasn’t much alcohol for the big people!

We check in a bit before we’re supposed to be allowed to and managed to unpack and crash for a few hours’ sleep – remember it’s now Tuesday afternoon and we haven’t slept since Sunday night… and we’re old and not used to doing that anymore! We headed out at about 6pm to wander around a little and get our bearings – after about twenty minutes of wandering we bump into Brian and Sue on a random street corner nowhere near the hotel. They’d been wandering the back streets in search of a dive bar to continue a tradition when the rest of the gang arrives…

They temporarily give up on their mission and we head off to the station in search of some dinner – there are a lot of restaurants at the station! We find a great little place and have a terrific meal of Yakisoba and kebabs.

Back at the hotel we find Pat Major with a Martini and a Club Sandwich so we join him and catch up for a while before we feel the need to crash somewhere around 10pm… that goes well until 4am when Gill and I are wide awake and reading our books.

On Wednesday Gill and I go hunting for fabric and fibre stores on a bit of a recce for a SOAPs’ shopping trip. It doesn’t start well when the first shop we try and find has closed – we find this out when we ask the wonderfully helpful centre assistants whose first language is not English where the shop is, only for both of them to coo (literally!) “Aaah, <insert shop name here>” before making the universal sign for closed and crossing their arms in front of them… and then apologising furiously for the fact that the shop we were looking for wasn’t there any longer…

We had slightly more luck looking for the next one – it wasn’t where it was supposed to be – it had moved, so someone helpfully pointed us in the right direction… sort of. We got to within about a block of where we thought it was, but couldn’t find it so we asked a lovely old lady at a bus stop – she recognised the name immediately and insisted on taking us to the shop herself – not sure if she actually caught her bus after that! We didn’t feel too bad about missing it – we’d walked right past it – as it was on the 2nd floor and the only sign of its presence on the ground outside was a name in the lobby in Katakana – something neither Gill or I have mastered yet! It turns out to be an Aladdin’s cave of crafty stuff… good find!

From there we ducked into a department store that happened to have a craft, fabric and fibre store in the basement – Gill’s delighted, and when we head up to the toy department, I’m delighted to find a small selection of puzzles, including an almost complete selection of Hanayamas so I pick up a copy of Cast Diamond and Cast Cake.

We have a couple of dark chocolate iced mochas at Starbucks (this became a bit of a theme given the temperatures and the humidity while we were there) before heading across to the Kyoto Cycle Project to meet Hideaki. He’s our tour guide for the afternoon and takes us on a wonderful tour around the back streets of Kyoto, along the canals & river, taking in a couple of the geishaquarters and the Imperial Palace. Interesting to see a smart mini-bus disgorging a load of smartly-dressed businessmen in the centre of the geisha district while several impossibly doll-like maiko clip-clop between their tea-houses and the school building. We cycled up and down the banks of the Kamo River with a lightning tour of the Imperial Palace in between, before getting absolutely drenched in a downpour about half a mile from the cycle shop at the end of the tour. Sod’s Law!

We grab a sandwich and a coffee in the mall before heading back to the hotel and formally registering for IPP36 – badges around our necks it starts to feel like IPP has begun. Dinner for the two of us is at a restaurant across the road from the hotel… and after a quiet dinner we realise there’s a large table-full of puzzlers at the other end of the restaurant so we wander over and find Nigel and Steve and a bunch of other friends we haven’t seen in ages (or a couple of weeks!).

When everyone’s finished their dinner we head back to the hotel and pretty much take over the lobby area. There are even more puzzlers there to catch up with and I find myself alternately thrusting puzzles at others and having puzzles thrust at me… by far the one that gives me most pleasure is a new design from Ken Irvine called Lil’ Bruce (named after his second grandson). Four pieces make it absolutely clear exactly where they need to go, you just can’t get them to actually go there… brilliant puzzle.

We chat and puzzle and drink in the lobby until we’re exhausted and then crash… it’s been a year since we’ve seen some of these guys – it has to be done!

Thursday is the official bus tour to Himeji Castle and the Japan Toy Museum. After an early breakfast we find a happy bunch of puzzlers queuing for three buses – we opt for the last bus along with Frank, Chinny and the Pawliger-clan and we’re soon joined by the Chinese contingent. Markus is also there and he’s dishing out folding puzzles to amuse us en route. Louchen and I find ourselves comparing notes for the various folding challenges – after a slow start I finally crack the first one, and find the next two go down reasonably soon after, but then things slow down a lot and it feels like ages before I finally manage to get the next in the series folded properly – and by the end of the day I find I’ve still only completed four out fo the 7 challenges. Score one for Markus!

I do manage to entertain Markus for a while on the bus with my copy of Haleslock #1– I think he really enjoys the solve and gets through virtually all of it without any suggestions.

Our first stop of the day is at the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge for a little sightseeing -it’s blisteringly hot after the cool of the aircon in the bus so we take a couple of quick snaps and then pile into the (air-conditioned!) visitor centre work our way around the various exhibits showing how the bridge was built and how it compares to similar bridges around the world… a little fact for you: during the construction, the area suffered a serious earthquake and one of the spans needed to be lengthened by a metre because the gap between the towers had changed!

Back on the bus for the ride to Himeji Castle before a hot and sweaty hike up to the top of the main keep – had to be done, if only for the stunning view of the ant-people down below, oh, and the cheesy tourist pics!

The walk down feels a lot more pleasant than the hike up and we wander across the road for shaved ices and iced coffees – as good a choice for lunch as any!

From there our buses take us to the Japan Toy Museum that houses a collection of around 100,000 mainly Japanese traditional toys and games.

Frank managed to find the four Kumiki puzzles on display (think he has some sort of spidey-sense for them!) and then most of us crammed into their classroom for a hands-on lesson in making a Jacob’s Ladder- apparently a traditional Japanese toy.

I wonder how many other countries lay claim to something similar?! [Several according to Wikipedia!] We’re led by our enthusiastic museum director who is being translated by an even more enthusiastic assistant – all for the princely sum of ¥200! (Really cheap, even after Brexit!)

We stop at a nearby motorway services on the way out for some dinner – ordered on a big electronic picture board that spat out magic little pieces of paper (all in Japanese) that you could exchange for your food… if you could recognise it!

The bus trip back to the hotel was a long fight against the urgent need for some sleep, but managed to have a really nice chat with Chinny…

Back at the hotel we run into Wil sitting all on his own, after a quick hello we head to the room to disgorge rucksack before going to the Design Competition room and all that that holds… :-)

I make a bee-line for Mike Toulouzas’ Toolbox and Frank and I have a bash at it after Clive has admitted defeat after finding the first move. We manage to get all the way through it, but we’re pretty sure that we haven’t done things in the right order or used the right tools – and we managed to break the spanner in the process! (SORRY Mike!!) – we also managed to pretty much reset it all properly, and work out what we should have used in what order, with a little help from Jeff who’d done it properly earlier in the day.

I try my hand at a few other puzzles before Dick sits me down and shows me two lovely old Chinese locks that are looking for a new home – and he lets me take them off his hands, kind gentleman that he is!

When I decide to call it a night there’s still a throng of puzzlers merrily puzzling away…

On Friday Gill’s organised an informal Fabric & Fibre tour for a few of the SOAPs based on our earlier recce – and eight ladies head out in search or fabric, fibre and adventure… and I know for a fact that plenty of fabric and fibres are purchased – I shall say no more about the third…

The lads meanwhile headed out to Osho’s shopwith Brian leading an unruly bunch of us toward the station to grab a train out to the appropriate suburb. When we get off the shuttle bus to the station we find Edi and Sherry and the children have just arrived and they’re waiting for the shuttle to the hotel – plenty of greetings and quick catchings-up ensue before the unruly bunch heads off to the platform to grab the train… and somehow in the process we lose Strijbos! [No other casualties will be reported on this trip; you will be glad to read.]

The air-conditioned train ride is great, but the short walk in the 39 degree heat requires a stop at one or two roadside drinks vending machines along the way…

We find the appropriate staircase and head up and into Puzzle-In, Osho’s puzzle shrine: part personal collection, part puzzle shop, part play area … and truth be told there’s a pretty grey line between them all…

I picked up a few flat packing puzzles and when I tried to pay for them Osho told me how much he liked reading my blog – Gosh! Day made!

We all puzzled and chatted and generally visited for quite a while – at one point the doorbell rang and Hendrik walked in and seemed a little surprised to find the place already jam-packed with IPP-folk.

On the train back into Kyoto we realise that not many of us actually want lunch after all so we head our separate ways with a few of us hunting for tat in the basement of Yodabashi before heading back to the hotel.

I spend a couple of hours getting organised for the puzzle exchange the next day before finding the usual suspects waiting outside the hotel ball room for the Founder’s Reception. Jerry does a smashing job of welcoming the new comers before declaring IPP36 officially opened. There is a lot of milling around and catching up and some great grub, before most folks retire to the Design Competition room for some more serious puzzling and some less serious banter.

I head up to Chinny’s room for a bit and find myself acquiring a couple of his rather unique barcode burr adaptations…

Back down at the Design Competition Big Steve is bragging about just how organised he is – telling us all that in the morning his exchange assistant will be knocking on his door to wake him up and make sure that he’s going to be ready on time… What’s yours going to do he asks me,(clearly temporarily forgetting that Gill is my exchange assistant this year…) I can’t stop myself from saying that she will be rolling over and whispering “Wake up darling, it’s time to exchange” – the ensuing banter had several of us literally crying with laughter for ages …

For the record, Steve sounded a little rough in the morning – and we shall speak of this no more!

Saturday is Puzzle Exchange Day, so I don’t mind the 7am alarm – true to form Brian is in the lobby singing Jingle Bells... a quick breakfast and we all head to the exchange room where everyone’s keen to set up and get swapping – Gill and I lay out our wares and soon enough we’re off and exchanging.

70-odd exchanges later we’re exhausted – Gill’s done a brilliant job of keeping me organised and I have a suitcase full of new puzzles – life is good – and it does feel like Christmas!

Back up to the room for the obligatory loot shot with puzzles all over the bed before packing most of them into a box and heading down for the afternoon lectures.

William Waite gave a brilliantly illustrated lecture on Japanese keychain puzzles – complete with audience participation and knowledge sharing! Yoshi Kotani showed us how relatively simple it was to solve puzzles like Instant Insanity using languages like Prolog before Kathleen Malcolmson delivered a masterclass in producing the perfect dovetails for puzzles. The final lecture on Imaginary Cubes was really interesting – introducing the concept of an imaginary cube as a convex solid with three orthogonal projections that are squares before playing around with them and showing how some of them make an interesting puzzle… with the promise that they would be for sale the next day!

At the banquet that evening we shared a table with the Rothsteins and the Pawligers. The food was great, unfortunately the gannets got there before us and there was no dessert by the time we went looking for some – hey ho!

Our entertainment for the evening had had to be rescheduled so we held a puzzle solving contest…

The first round was an exhibition Sudoku solve featuring Wei Hwa, Lixy and Taro Arimatsu – with Taro winning reasonably comfortably while Nick commentated, and fed Lixy the occasional peek at the solutions – although that seemed to back-fire once or twice.

From there we progressed to an eight-person elimination solving contest, that I failed miserably to keep myself out of! We started fairly benignly with a 3*3*3 cube assembly, but I really made a meal out of it – at one point I even tried swapping some pieces with the solver next me in the hope that that would make for an easier puzzle… it didn’t! But it did raise a few laughs… when I eventually managed to solve my first puzzle and move on to the next one, several people were already onto the final disentanglement round. The tray-packing puzzle went a bit better and I didn’t end up spend an embarrassingly long time on that one… so I managed to at least make it onto my final puzzle before we had two winners form our round of four… and I have to say that I was in no way ashamed to have come third to Wei Hwa and Markus!

Another elimination round produced the four finalists who were given a suitably more challenging series of puzzles to solve… culminating in the first two to reach the last puzzle being given a pair of monstrous Chinese Rings puzzle – the sort that will literally take you years to negotiate – in spite of that both of them laid into them with relish! When the others had almost caught up, the first two (Wei Hwa and Markus) were then given a more reasonable disentanglement to attack, with Markus triumphing over Wei Hwa in the end.

It was great fun and all of us “volunteers” were given a prize – so I ended up with a sweet little Puzzlemaster branded version of Cast Dolce.

…more puzzling in the Design Competition room ensued after the banquet wound up.

Sunday is the puzzle party – usually one of the great highlights of my IPPs – however this year it was preceded by a bit of a chest issue that kept me up all night and saw me needing to head to the Emergency Room in the morning for some drugs and a cortisone drip…

Osho insisted on driving us to the hospital [Thanks Osho!!] and made sure we were getting helped and much interpreting help from Tetsuro who stayed with us the whole time we were there and made sure that we got everything we needed – Thank you to both of these puzzling friends who gave up the first few hours of the puzzle party to make sure that I was OK. (And to Lixy for getting me sorted at the hotel!)

While the drugs were doing their thing, I went back to bed and then made it down for the last hour of the puzzle party. Much concern was expressed and also a fair amount of relief to see that I was vertical - thanks all!

In spite of “missing all the good stuff” (not really!) I managed to pick up a fair few nice little trinkets, including a copy of the Imaginary Cube puzzle from Saturday’s lecture and a few little packing puzzles from Kotani-san.

Gill ushered me back to the room for some more rest before allowing me downstairs for a few of the afternoon’s lectures. Takashima-san gave a really poignant lecture on puzzles in wartime showing that puzzles literally transcended the war with both sides using the same puzzles for their propaganda messages. That lecture really struck a chord.

I ended up missing a few of the other lectures that afternoon while I caught up on some of the sleep I’d missed out on the night before…

At the awards dinner we were treated to a truly world-class act from Yosuke Ikeda– well worth watching the video link on that page! We were all thoroughly delighted – everyone in the audience had a permanent look of absolute wonder on their faces – you just had to smile all the way through his act… after the act, the applause was rapturous!

The Obligatory Renegades Photo!

Nick’s traditional awards show followed with the two Penta packing puzzles doing really well and an Honourable Mention for Mike’s Toolbox. It’s a good night for puzzles!

After the formalities wind up there are the usual long sad farewells to folks that we probably won’t see for another twelve months… but it’s been great to catch up again and to puzzle together.

That evening Mine puts a note on FaceBook to say that the Penta packing puzzles will be for sale in Hakone on Tuesday… and we just happen to be heading there on a bus with a hundred or so puzzlers!

Monday, and the drugs are starting to help, a bit.

We have an 8:30 bus call before we head east wending our way to Tokyo. Our first stop is at the Giant Kite Museum – where they just happen to have a pretty awesome collection of impossible objects of every single persuasion, from traditional Japanese bottle stuffing, to modern puzzles like Strijbos’ impossible aluminium dovetails.

Several impossible objects are for sale from Osho and a friend who’ve driven ahead of us to make sure they were all set up before we got there – grateful puzzlers did what they normally do in situations like this and bought many, many things from them!

Next was a stop at the Toyota Car Museum with some lovely specimens for the petrolheads to drool over – loved the blue Bugatti! Light lunch at the museum before we headed off to the next Toyota museum – this one specialising in the future technologies being developed – and outside their auditorium they just happened to have a fantastic Patrick Hughes perspective painting to mess with your head…

Another hour or two in the bus took us to our hotel for the evening – easily the dinkiest hotel (and rooms) I’ve ever seen. A bunch of us head out in search of food and find a great little restaurant that had a table for ten(!) available. We settle down for an extremely varied dinner before Gill and I fade early – still trying to catch up on the sleep we’d missed on Saturday night.

Tuesday sees a reasonable start with everyone keen to get on the buses and head for Hakone. We make one stop on the way there – at a services with a great view of Mount Fuji … and it’s not covered in cloud! The Tourism gods must be smiling on us today!

When we reach Hakone there’s a disorderly disgorgement of puzzlers as everyone tries to get to Izumiya first!

There’s a serious gaggle around Mine’s table outside of Izumiya where he’s selling ready-made bags of puzzles in two sets – I opt for Set A as I’d missed out on last year’s puzzles and that gives me a set of them as well as this year’s designs. I am delighted – happy to have already got what I really came to Hakone for – the puzzle boxes will be a bonus!.

I picked up a couple of the more recent Karakuri boxes and then Gill and I spent the rest of the wandering around the village, having lunch and chatting…

We visited the new Karakuri Museum – well worth a visit – there’s a Kamei secret door to get into the exhibition and woe betide anyone who tries to sneak around the back and get in without going through the secret door… Strayer, we’re looking at you!

Inside there are some wonderful Nonomiya and Okiyama boxes, a self-opening trick box (just press a button and watch it open itself up!), several items of puzzle furniture being enthusiastically demonstrated by the staff and even some Brian Young and Frank Potts puzzles on display. As I said, well worth a visit!

The drive into Tokyo was really interesting, especially as we entered the great city itself – where a number of subterranean expressways link parts of the city – accessed via long corkscrewing tunnels into the centre of the earth…

The bus drops us off outside one of the recommended hotels and we wander up a couple of blocks to get to our hotel for the next few days – we’re totally zonked and manage to find a sandwich joint for dinner and we crash really early…

Come Wednesday morning we realise that we’ve both picked up Chinny’s flu bug so we take it really slowly, taking in a few fabric stores that Gill’s scouted out via ‘tinterweb and I spend an hour wandering around the local Tokyo Hands. Dinner is in the hotel because we literally can’t face going out… damn flu!

Thursday sees another late start and we managed to head to Akihabara and find Torito where Meiko and Susuma are back at work again after taking a couple of days off to enjoy IPP36 (in fairness, they worked pretty hard there too!). I pick up a few small goodies there before we decide that we’re running out of ‘nergy and we need to get back to the hotel… and sadly we have to cancel our date with the Pawligers that evening at a Ninja restaurant in Akasaka… we have take-out in our room instead.

…and Friday is pretty much completely filled with travelling home – which takes us about 24 hours all told… but then we’re home with the pup and we can both convalesce a bit before work beckons on the Monday morning.

Even though things didn’t really go all that smoothly for both of us on this trip, we still got to spend time with some brilliant friends from around the world, got to play with some fabulous new puzzles, bought a few, swapped a lot and wouldn’t trade it for the world… same again next year?

Of course!

Two new puzzles really stood out for me at this year’s Puzzle Design Competition– interestingly they shared a common theme and a designer: Hajime Katsumoto. And I wasn’t surprised when they both took a Jury Honourable Mention and one also won the Puzzlers’ Award in the 2016 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.

They’re both excellent and if you get a chance to play with a copy, or pick up one of your own, you will not be disappointed!

Slide Packing has a really simple premise – it’s one of those puzzles you can just leave out without any description or instructions and everyone will instinctively know exactly what the goal is… you’re presented with a box in two halves and a few pentominoes … so clearly the object to put the pieces into the box and close it up… simples!

Anything but, actually!

The two halves of the box slide together on a pair of rails carved into the edges of the two pieces. The bottom half of the box will allow two layers of cubies and the top half will fit a single layer… the resulting space inside the closed box allowing for a full 3*3*3 cube. The pieces you need to put inside the box will only take up 20 of those 27 cubies – so there’s theoretically bags of space left over inside there once this thing’s solved…

Hopefully I’ve convinced you by now, dear reader, that this is not only theoretically possible, but you’re probably thinking to yourself that surely there’s another catch… well there ain’t – that is it!

But when you start playing with putting the pieces into the bottom half and sliding the lid closed you realise the problem – you’re going to have to either put one of the flat pieces inside the lid and get the others into the bottom half of the box without any obstruction to the top half, which would allow you to simply slide the lid into place, or you’re going to have to manoeuvre things around while the lid is semi-open and hope you can get things where you need them to be…

Now when I first sat down with this puzzle it was pretty clear what you were trying to do, and I very quickly found that everything I wanted to try wouldn’t work. So I fiddled around for a while and rapidly ran out of ideas…so I did what anyone in my position would do and moved onto the next puzzle… but in the back of my mind I kept playing around with the odd idea or two… and the next morning I’d come up with a plan that I was thoroughly delighted to find actually enabled me to slide the lid home with everything neatly inside the box… my favourite puzzle in the Design Competition and also the one puzzle I’d save.(*)

Penta in a Box consists of five pentominoes to be packed inside a neat little box with a hinged lid. Once again we have space inside the box for a 3*3*3 cube, so this time there will only be a couple of cubies spare once the box is closed… the pentominoes are also all different this time, which makes finding a 3*3*3 assembly a little more of a challenge!

Finding one is only half the battle, however… the hinged lid effectively swipes a little bit of the top front row of cubies because of the arc it takes as you close the lid… which is interesting because you know there are only two cubies spare in there, yet the lid will probably stop you using three of the cubies – and while it’s been a while since I did any really serious sums, even I remember that 25 into 24 don’t go good!

Thankfully there aren’t nearly as many possible assemblies with this set of pentominoes so it quickly reduces to the problem of closing the lid and how you can cunningly remove the apparent constraint.

Another puzzle that needs a bit of thought before the arrival of a massive “A-Ha!” moment…

Two terrific puzzles from Hajime Katsumoto – both were available from Mine’s webshop– hopefully more will become available in due course…

...and it's not just me who thinks these puzzles are brilliant! - Read Kevin'sthoughts over here...

(*) At one of my earliest IPPs one of the veterans asked me which puzzle that I’d acquired over the course of the magical few days I would choose to keep if I was only allowed to save a single puzzle? It was a brilliant question! And one that we generally discuss every year now… This year it would have to be Slide Packing!

Wil’s King’s Day Puzzle Party 2016

Lotus Box

PMPP 2016

Stickman #18 – Sphere Box

Pachinko Box

4L Co-Mo DD from Johan Heyns

MPP XXiii

Balls!

Hedgehogs…

Hales’ Turn the Plug

Any excuse!

Steve Miller’s Nutty Bolt #1

Blind Slot Machine

The Goblin’s Box

Diagonal burrs

(pre) IPP36

IPP36 Part 1

IPP36 Part 2

IPP36 - the rest of it... and then some.

Katsumoto-san’s winners