A Good End To A Bad Week! Sort Of...

MPP puzzle haul

It has been a rather bad week. Some very very big very looong operations which were not expected to be so big or so long which turned a couple of normal days into some very stressful big days. There is an old adage in anaesthesia that "many a good anaesthetic is spoiled by a surgeon having a fuck up" and this was very much the case. Nothing incompetent I hasten to add but just unexpected, unprepared for occurrences on the surgical side made my life very tough. It did mean that I had managed no puzzling at all during the week and was hoping that I might manage something to write about at or after the MPP. I was really quite pleased when the weekend hit and it was one of those days to get in the car and drive a couple of hours to Birmingham for an MPP with an unrecognisable roman numeral on it. I always buy a gigantic pile of car sweeties (I always lie to Mrs S about exactly how many bags I consume) to keep me going during the journey there and back - the constant dipping into the bag(s) prevents a knackered sleep deprived puzzler from dozing off in the car. It also has the added advantage of leaving me completely wired with a sugar high for a day of puzzling and banter. You will find out later when Allard writes his review of the day that I was particularly wired at one point and the tongue was loose! 😱🤣

One piece "unpacking" puzzle - OPUP

OPUP starting position

After getting home on Saturday night I picked up a couple of toys to play with and my misery continued. I had watched several people play with Dan's exchange puzzle the One Piece Unpacking Puzzle. A play on the original One Piece Packing Puzzle from the late Eric Fuller. Dan was kind enough to give me a copy and said that it really wasn't that difficult. Bastard!

I was hoping that I would have more luck with it than Eric's original which took me the best part of a year to solve!

Only took me a year! With some help

I duly removed the wire loop and took out the cube - There are 24 possible ways to insert the cube into the box and Sod's law actually made me get it right on the 20th try! This didn't bode well!

Now unpack the bloody thing!

AT the MPP, quite a few people played with it and I caught cries of delight at their success. I was very careful not to watch what they had done and this was the first one that I picked up when I got home. How hard could it be? Oh you stupid boy!

I have now spent about 4 hours playing with it and found a tool which has no apparent use and that is it. I have used a light source and a magnifier and found nothing useful at all. I'd like to put it down to fatigue from the week but nope, it's purely that I am rubbish at puzzles! There is only one cube to remove from a box! The temptation is to try and stuff a shim down the edge but it would need to be very thin and that would be cheating. Dan may be helping me out sometime! 😭

Next up when I got too frustrated with the OPUP, I had to play with something else to prevent me throwing it across the room. I picked up the Hamstersaurus puzzle which, with that name can only have come from big Steve!

Just from the name, you know who's puzzle it is

It was a burr and I really thought it was a variant on the tetrahedral burr that I had had fun with from my last MPP. A standard 6 piece burr but with extensions on it which interfered with movement and really messes with my feeble brain:

It's rather beautiful and has very sharp points!

It took me about 10 minutes of pushing and pulling everything in every direction to find the first move. The new shape still messes with your head. I then got a bit of a shock! It's not a standard 6 piece burr. As soon as the first slide has happened, it becomes clear that Burrtools is not going to help me later. There are diagonal faces inside! Oh Lord! Is this like the NOS burrs from Gregory Benedetti? Was I going to have 6 bright colourful pieces in a pile forever more? The rest of the disassembly took only a few minutes and I carefully took photos of the pieces as they came out. I then scrambled it to take my photos and then give me the reassembly challenge:

Hell! That is going to be a challenge to reassemble!

Luckily, Steve has designed this in such a way that the reassembly is possible using logic and a knowledge of burrs (a little bit of my too and fro memory probably also helped) - this one is possible for a simpleton like me in an hour or so. Phew! Some success at last!

Now I need to start shaking the OPUP vigorously to try and dislodge the cube! 😱🤣