Building Puzzles for IPP34

I'm busily cranking out puzzles to exchange, trade, and sell at IPP34.  In addition to a few old-standy puzzles here's a look at what's new from me this year...

Join The Club

For the Puzzle Exchange, this consists of two identical pieces that can be joined together to make a ♣ club shape.  Testers at my office gave me plenty of feedback and guidance, and it took some real effort to implement their suggestions.  My early revisions resembled an ordinary clover leaf, but testers insisted it needed a widely flared base in order to resemble a Club suit--it took some design ingenuity, but I made it work!

Curlicubes

Although I have built plenty of cubic dissections in the past, this one really surprised me!  It has two identical pieces that can be joined together to make a cube, but they just as easily join into a variety of abstract shapes.  It's a fancy-looking objet d'art when placed on a light stand, although it's hard to get a picture that shows how pretty it really looks.

Pink Marble & Yellow Marble

These are successors to the colored marbles from the Bag of Marbles which I had previously sold.  Pink Marble is a two-piece puzzle, the first in the series that can only be joined together at one specific point on each piece.  Yellow Marble is a three-piece puzzle that goes a step further; it's the hardest of the series, but not overly difficult for the average solver.

Credit-card-size SIM storage

This isn't really a puzzle, but it's a useful device when traveling overseas.  It exploits the SD300's laminated construction technique to build a thin storage device that's literally the size of a credit card, with storage pockets for four SIMs and an eject tool (or a paper clip).  Very handy!

Puzzle Party: IPP33 Opens

When I arrived in Japan for the International Puzzle Party many other puzzlers had already been there for quite some time, and they'd been out sightseeing and visiting.  I joined a small group of friends on an unofficial trip to visit a few puzzle sights, including (pictured above) George Miller, Roxanne Wong (wearing my ivy cap) and her daughter Katherine, and Naoki Takashima.

First we visited Takafumi Haseda, who operates the Tribox puzzle store online.  The store operates in a residential apartment converted into an office, a photo studio, and a stockroom packed with puzzle merchandise.  Pictured, Andreas Nortmann (too tall!), Roxanne, and Takafumi venture into the stock room search for hidden treasures.

Next we trekked to the office of Hanayama, the maker of the world's finest mass-produced brainteaser puzzles.  Above, Oskar van Deventer and his wife discovered a sign that greeted his arrival outside the Hanayama office.

A room at Hanayama displayed their huge assortment of Japanese toys and games, in addition to their world renown collections of cast puzzles.

Our next destination would have been Puzzle Shop Torito, but the shop was scheduled to be closed for a few days.  So we went sightseeing to the 2080-foot-high Tokyo SkyTree.

From the SkyTree we observed a puzzling building that exhibited an illusion like an MC Escher painting: the green roof appears to wrap around the two elevator towers in the center of the building, but the elevetor towers clearly connect to the green roof at different floors!

There's a glass floor for intrepid visitors willing to stand on thin air over 1000' above ground.

Back at the hotel, Dirk Weber successfully solved my Twisty Trillion puzzle.

Hanayama Puzzles exhibited a fascinating display that showed how many of their most famous puzzles evolved before they went into production.

My favorite entry in the 2013 Design Competition was Bram Cohen's Galaxy, which won a jury prize.  It went on to be manufactured by Hanayama Puzzles, widely sold by puzzle stores like Puzzle Master.

Rundown of puzzles for IPP33

 

Peppermint, my entry for the puzzle exchange, was digitally manufactured in colorful ABS by Bradley Rigdon at PrintTo3D.  I built prototypes on my SD300, those PVC models were a bit too flexible to give the right "feel" for this particular puzzle.  Each piece is made in two colors, red and white; the colors play a subtle but important role.

 Moiré Maze combines laser-cut acrylic and 3D printed vinyl.  The challenge is to guide a small magnet through the maze from Start to Finish.  That goal sounds simple enough, but it's easy to get lost in the visually-confounding patterns of rings reflected against a mirrored background.

Cubic Trisection is one of the puzzles I also sold at IPP32 last year.  The challenge is to assemble the three pieces into a cube, as shown.  All three pieces are identical, but not symmetrical.  Most users easily assemble the first two pieces, but encounter trouble adding the third.

Puckup is a two-piece assembly puzzle, which I'm selling in transparent material or a red-white color scheme.  Tyler Barrett suggested a somewhat edgier name "What the Puck" but the simpler Puckup name had already been picked up on one of the puzzle forums.

Twisty Trillion is a successor to Puckup whose shape provokes a lot more confusion among users.  Neither puzzle is fiendishly difficult, but Twisty Trillion takes most people a whole lot longer to figure out.  I built them all on the SD300 using transparent vinyl because light reflects attractively inside the puzzle.

I commissioned two copies of a Trillion Pendant to be built as puzzle jewelry--one in brass from i.Materialise, the other in silver from Shapeways.  But neither model was delivered on time--Shapeways lost one of the pieces, and i.Materialise is over 3 weeks behind schedule.  So I salvaged the partly-incomplete silver model by building its other half in luxuriously-dark blue vinyl, which contrasts gracefully with the silver piece.  Frankly, it looks nicer than it would have if both pieces had been silver!

Here's a colorful assortment of marble puzzles, three of which will be available for sale as Bag of Marbles.  The others are experimental designs, which I'd like to test on a few puzzlers at IPP.  In particular, the pink and purple models are two closely-related designs, but my first few testers think the purple one is much harder than the pink one.  Will others react the same way?  IPP is a great opportunity to find out!

Success 1 - International Puzzle Party 32 - Party Day

Each year the International Puzzle Collectors Association hosts a major puzzle event in various countries worldwide: the International Puzzle Party, affectionately referred to as "IPP" by those who attend it.  As a longtime puzzle collector I've really wanted to attend, but it's invitation-only and the guest list is carefully managed.  I was probably nominated on a previous occasion, without my knowledge, but was passed over.

My use of the SD300 has enabled me to become a puzzle creator, which connected me with several important people in the puzzle community and, in turn, won me a last-minute invitation to this year's IPP 32 in Washington DC.  So I attended the event in three roles: a puzzle collector, a puzzle maker, and a puzzle-design competition entrant.

Party Day would be a frenzied event where puzzle makers showcase their wares at tables in the hotel's large ballroom.  Puzzles and toys may be offered for sale or (preferably!) for exchange in hopes of bartering with other collectors for trades.  Although I'd never attended such an event, I reserved a table and anxiously formulated the best showcase I could devise.

But how could I create a showcase of amusements and transport it from my home in Oregon to Washington, DC, many thousands of miles away?  The deadlines were only two weeks away, so I had very little time to plan!

I solved both challenges by adapting the cartons from the SD300's material kits.  Gathering various containers from old supply kits, I found each shipping carton neatly held a modular collection of 12 small flip-top boxes and 2 larger tray-style boxes that had previously house glue and anti-glue cartridges for the SD300.  Bonus: I could use the inner cartons as additional shipping containers for puzzles I acquired in Washington DC!

I packed the boxes with puzzles and toys, and included an assortment of supplies that would contribute a festival atmosphere: battery-powered animated lights, sticky-note paper, markers, poster putty, and hundreds of zip-closure baggies of various sizes.

My showcase included a comical poster for Not So Strait of Dover, which was going to require some sort of easel or frame to display it.  Happily, I devised a simple 3D-printed device that converted Solido's tray-style box into a display-stand.  (inset above)  My table had things to look at, stuff to read, toys to play with, and puzzles for sale.  A satisfactory showcase.

It all worked, perhaps a bit too well for my tastes: I'd barely had time to frantically arrange things on my table when a deluge of puzzle collectors swarmed into the ballroom.  My table attracted a crowd that sustained so much attention that I didn't get a break for over five hours!  I only managed to get a picture of my table during the last hour, as things were winding down and my table was relatively empty.  (Thanks for taking my picture, Matt!)

I finally got a few minutes to visit a few other tables in the room.  Not enough time!  I especially liked this Puzzled Guy Bakery table, which featured exquisitely-crafted wooden puzzle boxes in the shape of petits fours.

And that just covers one frenzied, frantic day at IPP 32.  Later I will discuss the 3D model that comprised my entry in the puzzle design competition, and the story of the 3D model that won me an invitation to the International Puzzle Party in the first place!

Allard's blog Puzzling Times describes the Party Day experience from the other side of the table.

Brian Pletcher's blog has a great picture of the whole room, photographed right over my head!  (I'm the slouching guy in the black shirt.)