10-April-99 Railroad Rush Hour

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We had a long phone conversation with Anne, who lives several time zones away. She's giving me a lot of encouragement about writing this, especially the parts about before she was born, but is justifiably annoyed that you could read a lot of this and not know that I have a daughter. She's like me to write about the trip we took with her last summer, and I'd like to get to that soon, too. I have plenty of pictures that she and you would like to see. Anne has been learning dressage riding lately and is amazed at what she can get horses to do now.

Later in the day Charley stopped over to bring a present. There was no occasion, just that it was something he thought was so cool he had to get it for us. At a game convention in California a couple of weeks ago he and other people from his company had gone to dinner with Scott Kim, who showed them his latest project. It just went on sale a couple of days ago, and it's what Charley brought us. It's Railroad Rush Hour, a manipulative puzzle from Binary Arts, and Charley described it as “what a fifteen puzzle would be, if a fifteen puzzle were actually any fun.” It's a seven by seven space grid with two- and three-space-long locomotives, cabooses, boxcars, and tank cars, and two two-by-two-space freight and baggage platforms that can move on the grid. You pick a card from a puzzle deck and set up the cars according to the picture, then slide them until you can move your little red switch engine out of the gridlock. There are fifty puzzles of graded difficulty, and it's loads of fun because of the challenge and just because the pieces are fun to play with if you were ever into model railroads. It's one of those brilliant puzzles that is very easy to explain but not easy to solve. Charley's description of his boss and himself trying it out under the inventor's eye helped.