Puzzles 101

Introducing the Hundred and One Puzzle! This new puzzle will be shown by BV Leisure at the London Toy Fair. It's cool. It only has a little over 100 pieces and each piece gets a different picture. What this means is that you can't put the puzzle together by using the picture...only the fit of the pieces. So, even though it doesn't have very many pieces, its an amazing challenge. It's like putting together a puzzle that's all one color.

It's like doing a regular puzzle, but first turning all the pieces over so you can't see the picture. Incidentally, this technique is used by true puzzle lovers to make their puzzles more challenging. You can count me out, but I know of people who do this. They amaze me.

Anyway, if you live in the UK, these puzzle should start to be available around June and I hope to get them into the lines of other puzzle companies before the end of 2008. I think they'll be a lot of fun.

Short Attention Span Puzzles

I hear this all the time; "I used to do puzzles but I don't have the time or the space to work on them anymore." It seems that people still love jigsaw puzzle but they can't devote the resources necessary to pursue them as a hobby. I guess it's the same with everything. Everyone's busy and has a short attention span.

That's why I developed the 20 Minute Puzzles (I thought about calling them the Attention Deficit Puzzles). Visitors to the London Toy Fair will be introduced to these small dose jigsaw puzzles for the first time at the BV Leisure stand. I thought, "instead of working one 2000 piece monster puzzle, why not work 20 puzzles with 100 pieces each. You could complete one in 20 minutes or so. That means over lunch, before bed, to unwind after work, just about anytime. I packed 20 puzzles in each box, each with a different image. They're cool!

I hope to have them available in other countries very soon. Check back here or drop me a note.

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.

Puzzles from a Digital picture

Occasionally people will ask me how to get a puzzle made from a digital picture. They make great gifts for puzzle lovers. Most puzzle companies can't make them because they need to have production runs of several thousand puzzles in order to make any money. But, there are a few companies who specialize in small orders. You can even order just one or two. If you're interested try Snap Shot Puzzles or Portrait Puzzles and see if they can supply what you need.