THE GOLDEN PHOENIX

CANTONESE · SZECHUAN · POLYNESIAN

1418 READING ROAD · READING, PA · (610) 378-4218

THIS WEEK'S PUZZLE — LIGHT AND MIRRORS

PLACE 4 MIRRORS · GET THE LIGHT TO THE TARGET · ONE WAY TO SOLVE

MIRRORS
REMAINING:

/ / \ \

— from the designer's margin —

I drafted this one Thursday night with my mom's jasmine tea going cold at my left elbow. The trick I was after was the double-bounce in column 5 — once you see that the right-edge of row 3 has to send the beam DOWN, the rest is just bookkeeping. I was hoping a careful 4th-grader would get it in eight minutes. Whoever you are out there in 2026 still figuring out my placemat: thank you for sitting with it.

— C.C.

I drew this dragon-and-phoenix medallion in pencil at the kitchen table the week of August 9, 1993 when I was 17. My dad framed the original in cling-wrap and it's been behind the takeout register since the day Mr. Bukantz printed the first batch. It's not very good and I keep meaning to redraw it but my dad will not let me.

I found Nikoli at the Berks library in March of this year — my math-club friend Becca has a subscription to Pencil Puzzles. I have been designing my own variants ever since. This one is a Light-and-Mirrors. It's mine. I made up the rules.

Jasmine steam at dusk.
Pilot Razor Point in hand —
one puzzle a week.

Four mirrors is the constraint I keep coming back to. Three is too easy, five always splits into multiple solutions. Four gives me one path that a careful nine-year-old can find in eight or nine minutes. That's the audience.

The emitter pointing right is the giveaway — every puzzle this year has had it on the left edge so I can stand at the counter with the bristol board and check the first bounce by eye without doing the trigonometry. Cheating, sort of. Becca thinks so anyway.

Bottom of column four is where the target lives this week. I always try to put it somewhere a 9-or-10-year-old can SEE working — the beam needs to come down out of the grid where the kid can watch it land. My brother Daniel tested last week's in eleven minutes. He told me my third mirror was redundant and he was right.

— W. Bukantz, Reading Eagle Press —

I have run the Phoenix's Friday-morning press impression myself since week one in the summer of '93. My dad taught me at this same press in 1972 that the small accounts where someone hand-draws the original you treat with extra care. So I treat Cynthia's bristol with extra care.

— H. Chu, owner —

My uncle Wing-Sun helped me find this storefront in May 1981. A barber had it before, a shoe-repair before that. The 1418 address has been five different businesses since 1948 and we have been here the longest. Fifteen years this past June.

— S. Chu —

The jasmine is from a small Cantonese tea importer in Center City Philadelphia my husband has been ordering through since 1981. We brew a pot at the counter every two hours through the dinner shift. Cynthia drinks it cold at her drafting table Thursday nights. I bring her the pot on her way out the door Friday morning to the bus.

"THE BEST PUZZLE IS THE ONE YOU MAKE FOR SOMEONE YOU LOVE."

I rewrite six fortunes a week from my dad's wholesale-blank supplier's box of unprinted strips. The supplier sells the blanks at $1.40 a thousand. I don't tell my dad which ones I've rewritten. He says the customers can tell anyway.

PLACEMATS PRINTED FOR THE GOLDEN PHOENIX SINCE WEEK 1 — SUMMER 1993: 135,200

May 18, 1998 — Atherton Hall, State College PA
for whoever solved this one

I graduated Penn State this morning. Mom and Dad and Daniel drove up Saturday in the Accord and we had Sunday brunch at the Nittany Lion Inn at 9:14am before the noon ceremony at the Bryce Jordan Center.

I am writing this slip from my dorm at Atherton at 8:42pm Monday evening packing for the drive back to Reading on Wednesday morning.

I designed 273 weekly placemat puzzles for the Golden Phoenix across my five years from summer 1993 through this past Sunday May 17 1998 which was puzzle #273 — a 7×7 numbered-route puzzle I am pretty sure was the hardest one I have made.

I am starting a math-PhD at Penn State Main Campus in August on a teaching-assistantship. I am going to keep designing the weekly placemat puzzle from State College and mailing the bristol board to Mr. Bukantz at the Reading Eagle every Friday morning by overnight UPS at $4.18 a package which I have budgeted for.

Daniel said at brunch on Sunday that he was going to start helping me with the puzzles when he starts at Penn State Berks in September and that he wanted to learn the light-and-mirror variant first because that one is his favorite.

The Golden Phoenix has 800 mats going out every weekend for at least the next four years. I am the designer for the foreseeable future.

— Cynthia Chu, math-PhD candidate Penn State,
age 22, May 18 1998.