So, what makes a good jigsaw puzzle
do they make complex jigsaw puzzles where the pieces, like, match the shapes in the photo/art?
Do you put the puzzles together upside down so all you see are the shapes of the pieces or is that considered cheating?
Shape variety and fit are important. For shape variety, my favorite is Springbok. For fit, my favorite is a Hong Kong brand called 3DJP. The pieces are made out of plastic and click together.
The picture also has a big impact. Lately I’ve enjoyed cartoon puzzles that are filled with lots of small details. It’s nice to put two pieces together and see “oh, that penguin is taking a selfie.” The puzzle shop I go to carries a European brand that specializes in cartoons, and they’re pretty great.
Last, I like a good gimmick. I just finished one where the picture you put together isn’t the same as the picture on the box. Instead, it’s a picture of what one of the characters sees. Another one I did was a murder mystery where I read a short story and had to put the puzzle together to solve what happened. Another puzzle had sections that you could slide away and reconfigure to make a different picture.
I realize this post is very dry but that’s appropriate because it s about jigsaw puzzles.
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nothing worse than a wet jigsaw puzzle
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That’s why you pay a premium for plastic:
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you know that foam that expands when you get it wet, and you get a dinosaur or some shit? someone should make a jigsaw puzzle out of that so you can assemble it small then throw it in your pool and have a big wet puzzle and people will all go “wow how did you assemble these big, floppy pieces” and you can just smile coyly
alternative idea: shrinky dink jigsaw puzzles
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We need you in the toy biz, ASAP.
Other ideas:
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Invisible ink puzzle that’s just black and white until you run one of those special markers over it.
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A puzzle where the pieces are really small and fit together to make puzzle-piece shaped sections that you then put together to make even larger puzzle-piece shaped sections, and so on.
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What do you do with the finished puzzles? This, the vashti bunyan countryside, and adamant refusal to stop eating jellybeans during the beautiful game tournament makes me think of you two as the most wholesome couple. It’s great
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CSI Puzzle with blacklight-reactive crime scene
It’s me, the guy who has to ruin nice things
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We crush them and throw them back in the box—except for the plastic ones. They’re all stacked on each other or hanging on the wall.
I’m very proud of our most wholesome status. For another window into our world, we are currently listening to Shakira while cooking a Thai spicy catfish curry. It actually came out really well!
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ive seen like 20 videos now of people destroying other’s finished puzzle as a prank and ihave to tell myself over and over that its staged otherwise i would fucking cry
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not the feeshing rods!
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tumen ulzii, founder of the international intellectual museum in ulaanbaatar, mongolia, explains a puzzle to children in the 1980s
felix gonzález-torres, untitled (cold blue snow), 1991
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I got an interesting book for Christmas that would probably interest a lot of people on this site. It’s called The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book and it’s filled with linguistic brain teasers that don’t require any particular foreign language knowledge to solve (though a familiarity with linguistic logic and awareness of variety helps). These puzzles are all sourced from “Linguistic Olympiads,” a type of competition I didn’t know existed but apparently exists in multiple countries. I think it originated in the USSR. The editor does a great job of organizing the problems by topic and connecting ideas so that you can get in a critical thinking groove.
Here’s an example based on George Bernard Shaw’s Shavian alphabet:
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b, d, e, a, c; a horizontally-flipped J (Shavian p rotated 180°, as the pairs are voiced/unvoiced)
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Yep! This is one of the more straightforward puzzles, but it gives you a good idea of the rule finding puzzling that you have to do.
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Did an escape room with the family today; we didn’t make it all the way through (although we made it to the final puzzle) and we had to get some hints along the way, which just cements for me that I’m not very good at the kind of logic that these things and point-and-click adventure games ask for. The thirteen-year-old found it pretty fun and the eight-year-old a little overwhelming. The quality of the experience and the production values were really impressive though, highly recommended for anybody doing this sort of thing in the East Bay.
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Here’s a really complicated one based on a counting system in Papua New Guinea, so think outside of Base 10. I couldn’t solve it myself and looked at the solution. I want to see if anyone else can get it. If you solve it, please hide your solution behind spoilers. I’ll give a hint tomorrow to help people solve it without giving too much away.
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