The International Puzzle Party

Possible International Puzzle Party logo, in the style of "Godel Escher Bach"There’s a huge global puzzle event taking place in London this August. The kicker is that it’s not the 23rd World Puzzle Championship, which the site has mentioned in at least a dozen posts to date. As the subject line suggests, it’s something quite different.

The focus is on physical, mechanical puzzles, and the International Puzzle Party web site explains the event as follows:

The purpose of the International Puzzle Party is to provide an annual forum for serious puzzle collectors for the exchange and sale of puzzles, books and related items, as well as for fun and fellowship. In short: puzzling fun for puzzling enthusiasts. International Puzzle Parties have been held almost every year since 1978. IPP’s are usually organized in three-year cycles in the USA, the Far East, and Europe.

Attendance at any International Puzzle Party event is by personal invitation only, from the hosting team. This is why the web sites of future IPP’s require a password. Please do not advertise future IPP’s to people who are not invited; do not even mention the exact locations nor dates.

Accordingly, the Puzzle Place calendar suggests that the next IPP will take place in London in August, but is no more specific than that. This secrecy is… well, it’s their business and nobody else’s, but as barriers to entry go, it’s pretty high. Perhaps it might be relevant that being a “serious puzzle collector” is not at all a cheap hobby – for instance, one of the few other resources about the event, Karl Scherer’s page, suggests people with only 500 puzzles might call themselves “small” collectors. These puzzles are precision craftsmanship, at the very least, so it seems reasonable to expect these collectors to be, perhaps, well-heeled, and the actual makers to be tremendously talented with their tools.

Part of the joy of the puzzle hobby (or, rather, the dozens of parallel little puzzle hobbies) is that you can engage with them in as much or as little depth as you like, and it seems surely likely to be accurate for mechanical puzzles as well. While the International Puzzle Party might choose to be exclusive, it has inspired other puzzle parties that are much more accessible. This site has mentioned the Midlands Puzzle Party in the past, with the Puzzle Place calendar quoting two more this year in early August and late October; additionally there’s the London Puzzle Party monthly, at 7pm on the second Tuesday of each month, at a Holiday Inn in Camden Town. The whole of Martin H Watson’s site is well worth a read; lots of good, mechanical-puzzle-focused, things to enjoy there.

Of course, it is probably just historical accident that Puzzled Pint also happens in London, starting at 7pm on the second Tuesday of each month; it seems very likely that people who enjoy one would also enjoy the other, though people would surely have a preference, probably for whichever one they were familiar with first. What are the chances of both events picking the same day of the month? One naive guess is “about 1 in 31”, but perhaps “about 1 in 15” is a more likely estimate; after all, people are likely to have competing demands giving them less time for such fun gatherings at weekends (and, perhaps, shoulder weekdays) – and maybe it’s somehow just too obvious to aim for the first week of the month…!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *