World's Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle

The World's Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle was first published by Buffalo Games in 1985. It was their first jigsaw puzzle. It was a runaway success and propelled them into the marketplace. Good thing, too, since the games that were taken to that first Toy Fair (actually the 1986 Toy Fair) didn't fare so well. Actually, one of them, a drawing game called Speechless, did very well, just not in the United States. It outsold Pictionary for many years and is still produced in the UK by BV Leisure and has a Spanish version, Sin Palabras produced by Goliath.

But, that's not the point of this post. The World's Most Difficult (affectionately abbreviated WMD) jigsaw puzzle really started something and it has sold more than four million copies worldwide. It wasn't the first specialty jigsaw puzzle, but it was one of the first. Seldom is the inception of a product anything more than an accident or an evolution, but WMD was the result of some pretty interesting team thought.

The special cut of WMD was invented by John Fisher. The Fisher family started the Fisher-Price company. John Fisher and my father (the legendary Don Scott Sr) ran a puzzle company called TUCO for a number of years. During this time, the question of what makes a jigsaw puzzle challenging came up many times. We noticed that it was pretty easy to tell the back from the front. John suggested that we could put the same picture on both sides and cut it once from each side (cut the horizontal locks from one side and the vertical locks from the other). In fact, we called this the "Fisher Cut". We made it even harder by making all the pieces the same shape.

To make WMD still harder, we put confusing, collage style artwork on it. It's now sold in Australia, the US, Japan and the UK (by Paul Lamond) and is certainly one of the most successful puzzles of all time. Puzzle lovers have always looked for something different and after nearly a quarter century, the World's Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle is proof that they still do.