Jigsaw puzzles are one of my favorite activities. I absolutely love the feeling of fitting the last piece into the puzzle and having the satisfaction of seeing the whole completed image. I have done many different types of puzzles from 3D puzzles to virtual ones. Ultimately though, I have a few go to mediums for getting the most out of my time spent working out a puzzle, these are my top three:
Real life 2D puzzles
Doing puzzles by hand is definitely the most enjoyable and most satisfying approach to puzzling. The little joyous feelings that run through your heart when you find the piece that perfectly fits is something so specific that it is kind of hard to get other people to understand if they themselves are not puzzle lovers. I don’t exactly remember when I was first bit by the puzzle bug, but I do know that I was incredibly lucky because my mother also loves puzzles and she was more than happy to feed this hobby I was developing. I have a lot of memories of my childhood where my mom and I are sorting through and separating the thousands of pieces by color or shape. We would huddle around a giant puzzle we were assembling on the floor in front of our fireplace with a couple lamps to provide us with the perfect amount of light to keep working well into the evening. Even though I loved puzzles, there were still moments where I would get so frustrated and give up in the middle of putting one together. The best example of this is when I decided I would try to tackle a puzzle of van Gogh’s Starry Night. But not just any normal Starry Night puzzle. This one was made up of a mosaic of tiny space themed pictures so that from far away it looks like the Starry Night painting but as you get closer you are able to distinguish the millions of tiny pictures that actually combine to create the bigger picture. I think I started the puzzle around third or fourth grade and abandoned it within a couple of months of opening the box. I had already organized and separated out the pieces to try to make putting it together easier, so I packed all the separated piles of pieces into many different Tupperware containers and shoved it all the way to the back of my closet. It wasn't until the summer before I started my freshman year of college that I decided to pull it back out of the dark depths of my closet and force myself to complete it. I set up a puzzle mat, re-acclimated myself with the already organized pieces and put The Hobbit films on constant repeat and dove right in. I did get it put together by the time I was preparing to move into the dorms at college so I mounted the finished project onto a canvas and hung it up in my dorm room. I guess you could say it was meant to be a reminder to never give up and persevere through difficult tasks. But, honestly, I think my thought process was more along the lines of not wanting to destroy the puzzle that took me multiple years to complete.
Digital puzzle/puzzle apps
As my life shifted to college, puzzles basically disappeared from my life all together. This wasn’t a purposeful choice I made, it was just that there was no space in my dorm room to lay out a 1,000+ piece puzzle. As a result, I took to the trusty app store to find something puzzle related to satisfy the jigsaw shaped hole in my life. I settled on an app called ‘Jigsaw Puzzles - Puzzle Games’ and I am pretty pleased with it. The max amount of pieces the puzzles can have is 400 pieces but given that I had homework and other responsibilities to take care of, only having access to slightly smaller puzzles was not a bad thing in the grand scheme of things because it stopped me from being able to procrastinate for so long. I could pop into the app, satisfy my puzzle craving, and then pick back up with writing essays or reading textbooks. Much less fun activities but at least I could have a quick and accessible puzzle interlude to make it more bearable.
IQ twist
Another type of puzzle activity I really enjoy is a little brain teaser called IQ twist. My dad picked this out for me as a surprise Christmas gift one year and I absolutely love fell in love with it. This is a little game with pegs that you place in certain places depending on which puzzle layout you choose and then you have to fit the tetris-like pieces around the pegs and open spaces to make them all fit in the four by eight playing board. The game comes with a booklet that gives you different layouts for arranging the little pegs that have varying levels of difficulty when it comes to fitting the other pieces around them. It is the perfect game to challenge your mind and exercise your logic muscles. I also love that this game gives me something that I can do with my hands while I listen to podcasts or watch TV since I find it hard to sit still and I always feel like I need to be doing multiple things at once. I can flip to the easier puzzle formats in the little booklet and just have something to mess around with in my hands while I do other things.
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