More PPing in the Big Apple – NYPP 2025

The first PP of the year is always a welcome event. I always look forward to reuniting with the local puzzle community at the annual New York Puzzle Party (NYPP).  This year’s NYPP was held on 7 June 2025 and featured the usual mix of mingling with other puzzlers, attempting to solve puzzles, listening to prepared speeches, and the occasional puzzle selling/buying.  This year the event was also being filmed like last year’s International Puzzle Party (IPP) in support of a future documentary featuring the puzzle community.

It’s always nice to catch up with fellow puzzlers.  There were also a couple of new attendees from the Mechanical Puzzle Discord (MPD) that I enjoyed meeting in person.  And of course you can’t chat without working on a puzzle.  You know what they say about idle hands.

There were some very impressive puzzle collections brought by some of the participants and I had the opportunity to solve Free Me 7 by Joe Turner and Ring Case and Chubby Crocodile by Junichi Yananose (Juno) from Pluredro.  Despite the online warnings to be gentle to avoid scratching the puzzle, Chubby Crocodile had received some tough love prior to NYPP and had some pretty serious gouges to show for it.  It’s unfortunate that the pins used didn’t have rounded ends.  

There were more new and old Pluredro puzzles that were available to play with including Gentle Interlock, Grooved 6 Board Burr #7, Dial Case, Mittan, and Sequential Discovery Board Burred Box (SDBBB).  Other puzzles of note on the table to play with included The Louvre by Mr. Puzzle and Jack in the Box by Jesse Born.

Although I didn’t have enough time to play with it, there was also a Stickman Gordian Knot puzzle made by Lewis PD Puzzles using resin casting.

Haym Hirsh also brought along some of the Jigsaw puzzles that he has been working on including his exchange puzzle, Jigsaw 4, from the 41st International Puzzle Party (IPP) last year.  He had copies available for sale along with copies of his exchange puzzle from IPP40.

As usual, George Sicherman brought along some printed puzzles where the pieces could be cut-out to solve.  These included his Rock Garden symmetry puzzle with 4 pieces and his 2025 New Year’s Puzzle with 4 pieces that can be used to make various rectangles.  This puzzle is also still available in laser-cut acrylic from Nothing Yet Designs. 

In fine NYPP tradition, several attendees provided presentations.  This year’s talks included the following:

Snail Ball – Don: Since there were only 2 scheduled talks for this year’s event, it was suggested that participants could present their favorite puzzles either to the group or individually on camera to support the documentary being filmed.  Don took advantage of opening the discussions with a demonstration of the Snail Ball and a discussion of how it works.  It’s simply a ball that rolls down a ramp but it moves very, very, very slowly.  You just have to take his word for it that it’s moving.  This puzzle is available from Grand Illusions.  Don also demonstrated a keepsake box that could be used to store valuables.  I believe that he mentioned that is was an update to a version made on a lathe by a 10 year old boy.
 

Puzzle Video Games On Consoles (And Maybe PC, MAC, and Mobile) – Michael Cahill: This year, Mike gave an overview of a selection of video games and their objectives.  The presentation covered:

1. Puzzle Hybrid Games – Included Merge and Blade.
2. Puzzle Adventure Games – These included Scorn, Escape Academy, Case of the Golden Idol, Superliminal, Botany Manor, and Indian Jones and the Great Circle.
3. Lemmings, But in 3D – 2 games were covered of which I only caught the name of Humanity.
4. Deeper Dive Into Individual Puzzles – These included Arcade Paradise, Blue Prince, Balatro, and Chants of Sennaar.

 

BurrTools Tutorial – Haym Hirsh: Everybody who’s anybody in the puzzle community loves and uses BurrTools.  So Haym provided an overview and demonstration of it’s capabilities and how it can be used to solve and design puzzles for those who want to be in the who’s who of puzzledom or just brush up on functionality.  In fact, I learned that Source Forge has the 32 bit version and Git Hub has the 64 bit version.  The group also expressed gratitude to Andreas Röver for creating BurrTools and gifting it to the community 
 

City Challenge Puzzle – Joyce Michel:  During the gathering, Joyce distributed copies of the City Challenge that she developed.  It consists of challenges where you have to determine the city that is being referenced.  Each clue consists of a rhyme that identifies the city and each city contains the initials of the state where the city resides.  The example given is: This capital city’s a fine college town, The buildings are pretty and the Ivy is Brown.  The answer: Providence, RI.  The answers were reviewed at the end of her presentation and I believe that the collective group managed to solve each one.

Lights, Camera, Action !

PPing in the Big Apple - NYPP 2024

After a long hiatus, I’ve finally gotten back to PPing.  And what better way to start than with the 2024 New York Puzzle Party (NYPP).  There’s nothing like a good PP to brighten your day.  The best part is reconnecting with all the other puzzlers you haven’t seen in ages.

The NYPP used to be held in February to align with the World’s Toy Fair, but has now been moved to the end of April to celebrate the end of tax season.  No more sloshing through wet snowy drifts in the middle of the Big Apple, but no one is complaining.

The best part of NYPP is seeing all the puzzle displays and getting the opportunity to play with new puzzles.  There is always a nice variety of puzzles and puzzly things to fiddle with.

NYPP 2024 was held on 20 April.  My goal this year was to ensure that nobody bought one of the Completely Broken Soma copies that I brought, and I’m proud to say that I successfully accomplished my mission even though the best part of NYPP is the opportunity to buy/sell/trade puzzles.  That reminds me that I need to post another Completely Broken Soma warning update.

Of course the best part of NYPP is the schedule of presentations.  This year’s speakers covered a variety of topics:

Giving Puzzly Gifts – Josh Rosenfeld, ODES UNBOXED: Josh shared the story of his journey in developing personalized puzzles tailored to the recipient.  A journey starting with a birthday puzzle adventure through hundreds of gifts later as a business.  Josh’s presentation centered on his approach to developing these gifts and highlighted 5 stages:

1. Identifying what you want the gift to convey.
2. Crafting the giving of the gift.
3. Building a world for the recipient to inhabit.
4. Shaping the puzzles around what a person loves.
5. Revealing meaningful rewards.

Geared Mechanisms – Henry Segerman: Henry started with an update on his work with Holonomy and its application to puzzles.  He started with the pursuit of complexiturizing the flat 15 puzzle until it morphed into “something that you don’t want to play with”.  Several holonomy examples were shown, demonstrating that a moving piece following a complete circuit will have a different orientation at the end of the circuit from when it started.  Examples included the Dodecahedral Holonomy Maze and the Continental Drift Puzzle.  Henry did confess that the next generation 3D rotational holonomy puzzles are not fun to play with.  Sounds exactly how I market my puzzle designs.  After the holonomy update, the main portion of the talk was on geared mechanisms.  Best of all, Henry had table full of examples on display that could be played with.

Games Magazine Archive – Michael Cahill: Mike picked up where he left off at the last NYPP that I attended (back in 2020) with some more game show trivia.  This year, Mike gave an overview of:

1. The Devil’s Plan – Korean game show featuring a reality competition based on strategy games.
2. The Floor – Time based trivia show.
3. Generation Gap – Cute game with a psychologically damaging endgame.  Mike pointed out that this game scarred family relationships for life.

The main portion of the discussion focused on contests that went awry and one in particular that was put out by Games Magazine.   Mike researched this by going through old issues of Games Magazine on archive.org after seeing a news reference to a large contest payout due to an error in the execution of the contest.

Waffle Puzzle – Glenn Iba: I believe that the title of this discussion was Cuyler Cannon but my faulty memory failed to produce a reason why.  The discussion centered on the process of creating a program that could solve the daily Waffle Puzzle.  Glenn provided a step by step approach on how such a program is constructed.

The Soma Renaissance – Haym Hirsh: Haym provided an overview of the multitudinousation of the Soma cube developed by Piet Hein in the 30’s that has spawned and continues to spawn Soma variants with no end in sight.  Haym fessed up to contributing to this pandemic but cast blame on others as well including Theo Geerinck, Oskar van Deventer, Lucie Pauwels, Frans de Vreugd, Brian Young, Rick Eason, Martin Watson, Volker Latussek, Andreas Röver, and even that Soma mangler, Ken Irvine.  As fascinating as the Soma history review was, it was overshadowed by Haym’s mastery of hand puppetry.

Still Amazing, The Windy Windy Twisty Route – Dick Esterle:  Dick presented some material that he had shown at G4G.  The presentation provided a Glimpse of the geometry that Dick uses to create puzzles as well as the Amazing Geometry Machine. 

I must confess that at one point I was that annoying audience member making those clack, clack, clackity, clack sounds during one of the presentations as I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to cram 3 simple (but oh so complex) pieces into a box.  One of those, looks simple but not possible, puzzles.  The fact that the 3 pieces, Curvy, Bendy, and Wavy were not too steady on their feet caused them to tumble down in a rather noisy fashion.  Undeterred by venomous stares, I continued to clack away.  At least I assumed that there were venomous stares since I sat in the back and could only see the back of everyone’s heads.  However, I did manage to get most everything back in the box.

A Puzzle Party in the Big Apple - NYPP 2020

You can never have too much PP.  Every year I look forward to IPP, RPP, and NYPP and whenever I get the opportunity, I like to do a little MPP as well.  When it’s February, I know that it’s NYPP time.  I know this because every Valentine’s day weekend, I tell my wife that I’m going away to play with puzzles.  ABSOLUTELY UNFORGETABLE!

On 15 February 2020, puzzlers converged on New York City to catch up with puzzling friends and the latest puzzle designs and information at the yearly New York Puzzle Party (NYPP).  One of my goals for this NYPP was to foist my unsolved Licorice +-x puzzle (How I Learned to Hate Myself - Licorice +-x) on unsuspecting people in the hopes that someone would solve it.  Meanwhile, I would be attentively listening to the planned talks.  There were 8 talks in total as follows:

• Best Puzzle Apps - Tom Cutrofello: Every year, our NYPP host and host of The Best iPhone, iPad Puzzle Apps and Mechanical Puzzles blog, Tom Cutrofello, gives us a summary of his Puzzle Apps Games of the Year (PAGY).   Tom’s overall summary was that it was not a good year for puzzle apps and the next year doesn’t look much better.  Specific puzzle apps that Tom liked and demonstrated included ReMaze, CMYK, Embergram, Sandwich Sodoku (super expensive puzzle app at $5), Loop Loop Puzzle, and One Line Weekly.

• MagnaCube - Ron Dubren: Tickle Me Elmo creator Ron Dubren described his new puzzle, MagnaCube, and is based on the Soma cube.  The Soma cube has 240 solutions and the faces of the 7 Soma pieces may be external or internal to cube depending on which of the 240 solutions you are looking at.  Ron’s idea was to add markings on the sides of the pieces and provide challenges specifying which markings should be visible or not.  One variation, called Potion Master, uses images for the markings, which are ingredients for a particular spell to make.  Another is called Numerology, which uses numbers and may consist of more difficult challenges such as having the exposed numbers add up to a specified sum instead of identifying the individual numbers.  The prototype was built using a Magic Cube that allows the pieces to magnetically attach to each other.  Freely rotating internal magnets avoid polarity issues.

• Designing the Logical Progression Puzzle - Rick Eason:  Rick Eason started his talk with a tale about a prior IPP exchange, where he provided his puzzle to another exchanger, who responded with “ Uh, another combinatorial puzzle.”  He then provided a detailed journey on creating his latest design Logical Progression and guaranteeing that there was a logical progression to solving it.  The solved state is a completely filled 4x4x4 cube and is an extension of Rick’s prior 3x3x3 puzzle, Double Hole Pin Cube.  A side effect of Rick’s presentation was that it made my Licorice +-x puzzle, which I brought along, look highly unattractive since I haven’t found a logical progression for solving it.  After Rick’s talk, anytime I tried to get someone to play with it, all I got was “Uh, that looks like another combinatorial puzzle.”  Sigh!

• Home Field Advantage - Peter Winkler: Peter Winkler is the author of Mathematical Puzzles: A connoisseur's Collection and Mathematical Mind-Benders.  For his talk, Peter presented 2 new mathematical word puzzles, one involving sports and the advantage (or not) of winning on the home field and the other based on the accumulated results of two betting styles on coin tosses using a coin with a non-even heads/tails probability.  Since I thought the answer was obvious, I’m assuming that I didn’t fully understand the problem and won’t embarrass myself by incorrectly trying to reproduce either here.

• Puzzles - A.J. Jacobs: A.J. Jacobs has written several books such as It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree, Thanks A Thousand: A Gratitude Journey, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to become the Smartest Person in the World, My Life as an Experiment: One Man’s Humble Quest to Improve Himself, and Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection.  He even brought some copies of Thanks A Thousand: A Gratitude Journey to share with the audience.  In addition to writing books, A.J. is an accomplished speaker and entertained us with several humorous tales.  A.J. was at NYPP to meet with the puzzle community and to announce that his next book will be Puzzles.  Or at least that is the temporary working title.  If his other books are any indication, that title will morph into something a bit more complex.  When I showed him my Licorice +-x puzzle and indicated that it has yet to be solved, he took the challenge to solve it before I did so that he could shame me in his new book.  I’m going to have to get busy on that puzzle to avoid going down in history as the hapless puzzler who couldn’t solve his own puzzles.

• CoverUp - Col. George Sicherman: The topic of George Sicherman’s talk this year was his puzzle Cover Up that was entered in last year’s Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.  He indicated that it was similar to his design competition entry 2 years ago, Hide the Gold, but had a key difference.  Although Cover Up has fewer pieces, one of the pieces is the table that the other pieces are resting on.  Cover Up has been provided by Wood Wonders and Mr. Puzzle but neither has seen fit to include the table piece.  George also mentioned a new puzzle that he designed, named Fraternal Twins, consisting of 2 identical octomino pieces that can be put together to form a mirror symmetrical shape.  He had a sample with him and they will be available in the near future at Wood Wonders.  One audience member questioned the use of fraternal in the name since the pieces were identical but it sailed right by most of us.

• MultiTarget - Glen Iba: Glen Iba, the developer of the Patchmania (the subject of a prior NYPP talk) and Monorail game apps, continued last year’s introduction to his MultiTarget game app with an update on changes that have been made as well as further details on its implementation using Android Studio on the Mac.  Demonstrations of the tutorial levels and some of the higher game levels was provide as well as a peek at some of the code.  Glen also provided a demonstration of how the levels were generated, tested, and graded.

• Exploiting Game Shows - Mike Cahill: Mike Cahill always provides an entertaining presentation at NYPP and this year’s talk did not disappoint.  The talk centered on the difficulty of generating an optimal set of rules for a game show and how flaws can be exploited by the contestants.  Several game show flaws were explained including the evolution of the rules for the show Big Brother over its first 6 seasons as contestants exploited the game rules and the producers struggled to fix the flaws.  Other game shows used as examples included Jeopardy, Awake, Crossword, America Says, 25 Words or Less, The Price is Right, and Pay the Rent.  Mike concluded with a personal story of how people didn’t believe his discovery of a game show flaw and how he got the last laugh by going on the show and winning by exploiting that flaw.

The most important thing that I learned is why I don't like the Licorice +-x puzzle.  This dislike now has a name: Combinatorial Puzzle!  The type of puzzle that provides no grip for your mind to grab on to and generate a solution, forcing you to employ a brute force attack by trying all combination.  This is fine for puzzles with only a few pieces, but the 9 pieces of Licorice +-x are too daunting.  However, I'm still optimistic that I'll find my own logical progression that will transform this shunned dog into a brilliant masterpiece.