Puzzles

My wife grew up doing puzzles with her family. I didn't quite understand the appeal until I got a look at the puzzles they did. They came in Gold colored boxes, without pictures to guide you, and were cut from 1/4 inch plywood. The pictures themselves were interesting, full of detail, and some of the shapes were cut to resemble iconic toys: rifle ... ballerina ... boat. Puzzles are very low key, non-competitive, and interesting. Anyone can walk by and spend a few minutes poking around looking for a piece to fit. Amazingly, our 15 year old and our 12 year old each sit at the puzzle table with us at the end of the day. We blast music and lean on each other. As family entertainment, this is low-tech gold.

We've bought puzzles over the years, when we could find ones that had some visual complexity, and the first thing we do, is throw away the picture. (It's surprising that most puzzles are of scenes with very little detail. How do you assemble a puzzle of a sunset scene, when most of it is sky and water?) We don't do a lot of board games together: it's hard to agree on one we all like, and sometimes the competition is hard on the family unit.

This year we found a puzzle made by Masterpiece Puzzlesfrom a picture of San Francisco by Eric Dowdle. After looking at the picture on the box long enough to determine that it was sufficiently complicated, we tore off the picture and chucked it. Oh, man, was this puzzle hard. We've been working on it, on and off, for two weeks.

It's a picture that, by itself, does not appeal to me--you see pictures like this in tourist shops in big cities. But in a puzzle, pictures like this, packed as they are with funny and quaint details are engrossing and entertaining.

In the picture below, you can see the 1000 piece puzzle under construction in my living room, along with a couple essential tools: hot tea to calm down the puzzle masters, and a spatula for moving little groups of assembled pieces without them falling apart. My wife keeps mumbling that her father would NOT approve of the spatula. I thought it was pretty smart.

It's even more detailed than it looks in this picture. Every building has distinctive window patterns, and they are crammed together in the work in such a way that it's really hard to understand how it all fits together until you see it done. Fun!

[Update. I found a company selling expensive wooden puzzles: they look beautiful and fun in the way I remember my in-law's puzzles, full of custom-cut pieces and interesting pictures. Stave Puzzles]


Here's the San Francisco puzzle for sale on Amazon (though if you have an independent local toy shop that you'd like to stay in business, call them first, please):