Somewhere in his brain, Nick Baxter says, there’s a puzzle-solving gene. It’s anything but recessive.
Since 1992, Baxter, ’79, MS ’80, has helped lead Team USA, as either captain or contestant, to 16 titles at the World Puzzle Championship, where puzzlers race maniacally through pencil-and-paper games. He has helmed the U.S. sudoku team. He is president of the International Puzzle Collectors Association, an outgrowth of his love of mechanical puzzles, like the Rubik’s Cube. (He acquires up to 200 such puzzles a year and runs a puzzle-design competition.) He has competed in the Red Bull Escape Room World Championships and was once part of a team that won a vacation package worth $15,000 per person in a New York City treasure hunt. And he finds time for a daily Wordle and crossword habit. “I stay pretty busy with puzzle-related things,” says Baxter, a former software consultant. “It might be a third of my day.”
Nick Baxter
Blame Euclid. The summer before starting high school, Baxter read the ancient Greek mathematician’s Elements—the bible of geometry—and fell in love with the idea of using a handful of axioms to build up to a hidden proof, a template that describes many of Baxter’s favorite puzzles today. You start with a couple of “knowns,” and you play with them in search of the magic aha moment.
What is new since Baxter’s youth—never mind Euclid’s—is the quality, quantity, and pervasiveness of puzzles. We live in a golden age of puzzles, Baxter says: a technology-enabled moment that has pulled crosswords out of back pages and into our pockets, turned solitary pursuits like word searches into social hives of group activity, and enabled the near-instant development, dispersal, and digestion of ideas. New versions of his beloved mechanical puzzles are designed on computers and sent out worldwide to be rendered on 3D printers. “The design loop is in a matter of hours, not in days and weeks as it was 25 years ago,” he says. It can seem less a question of whether someone likes to puzzle than of which puzzle they like to do. Do you Wordle or do you Spelling Bee? “The presence of puzzles throughout culture is much, much broader now,” he says.
So too throughout Nerd Nation: We’ve got jigsaw puzzle makers and jigsaw puzzle (champion) solvers, crossword mavens, and escape room experts. But you don’t have to be an aficionado to partake, Baxter says. Head-scratching is part of the joy. “Puzzles are really a way to force you to go down a path where you’ve got to achieve some intermediate milestones and eventually reach some final goal,” he says. “But the enjoyment isn’t the final goal; the enjoyment is the entire path.” Puzzle on that.
—Sam Scott
The Great Escape
Brent Holman wants these seven Stanford students to beat his clock—but just barely.
The Stanford students are an hour in when they get stuck. It seemed like a simple proposition at the outset: Seven undergraduates, together in one small chamber, with a set of puzzles they must solve in 100 minutes. But this is a battle of wits against their Farm forebear and one of the greatest creators of puzzle experiences in the industry: Brent Holman, ’92.
The battleground—a lair of problem-solving deep inside the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco—is Holman’s home turf. He’s the primary puzzle designer for Palace Games, which has created four escape rooms inside the city’s iconic landmark. This one, the Edison Escape Room, was voted the sixth-best in the world in 2018. It had debuted the previous year after more than a year of planning. “Good rooms take a long time,” Holman says.
The students are laboriously reinspecting a small wooden caddy of jars that none of them seems to understand when a bell rings out to let them know 60 minutes have passed. They’ve steadily conquered each of Holman’s challenges so far, but as they study the caddy and jars, it becomes clear that this one could eat up their remaining time. They have a decision to make: either persist on their own or pull the golden rope hanging from the ceiling—the summoning rope—which will prompt a staffer to pop into the room with a hint.
Brent and Linda Holman (Photo: Courtesty Linda Holman)
The award-winning puzzles in Edison are part of a sea change in escape rooms. Early rooms were oftentimes so devilishly difficult to conquer that players failed and left feeling frustrated. Many of the best rooms today are designed to make players feel smart, and it turns out that’s a much trickier proposition—one that the husband-and-wife team of Brent and Linda Holman are well equipped to solve. “Anyone can write an unsolvable puzzle,” says Linda (Nickel, ’94), who was one of the original designers at Palace Games and now serves as a consultant. “You have to write a puzzle that other people can figure out, and enjoy the journey, and solve it.”
Hidden microphones pick up the students’ concerned voices and transmit them to a staff surveillance station. Rhea Dalvie, ’28, wants to keep working at the jars, but with the minutes slipping away, talk turns to the summoning rope.
“We had basically already finished that entire puzzle,” Hamdi Hamid, ’28, says later. “We were just missing one piece.” A hint, they realize at the moment of impasse, won’t spoil the larger challenge, and it may mean the difference between victory and defeat. With all seven in agreement, Hamid reaches out and pulls the rope.
“That was a great time to ask for a hint,” says Linda, watching from the surveillance station. “Some people are super stubborn. One teammate will be like, ‘No one is touching that rope.’”
Seconds after the rope pull, a staffer peeks into the room and offers a nudge in the right direction that helps the students see the caddy and jars in a new light. Although they may have felt stuck, they’re in the hands of professionals, and the puzzles are still unfolding just the way Brent planned.
Let the Games Begin
The Edison Room is aglow in warm light. Against one wall, a matrix of wooden cubbies holds bare incandescent light bulbs. Against another, a brass gramophone sits on a small wooden table. Nothing looks a day younger than 110. “If you see coins in a jar, those coins are from 1915 or earlier,” says Linda. “Attention to detail is always important, right? Almost anything you’ll see in that room is there for a reason.”
All the escape rooms at Palace Games are inspired by the 1915 world’s fair in San Francisco (aka the Panama-Pacific International Exposition). The fair marked the debut of the Palace of Fine Arts, and it was attended by luminaries such as Thomas Edison (of incandescent light bulb fame), Harry Houdini, and Theodore Roosevelt, all namesakes of Palace Games escape rooms.
Photo: Flavien Bernardin
The rooms (which cost $425 and generally accommodate four to eight players) are located beyond a pair of 10-foot-tall rusty green doors on the back side of the Palace of Fine Arts building. This is where the journey begins for the seven students: seniors Joseph Sarmenta and Zora Hudson, and frosh Dalvie, Hamid, Amber Bansal, Ria Garg, and Toluwanimi Oke. They follow a series of long, crooked corridors to the Edison Room, where they are told about the summoning rope, assured that the entrance will remain unlocked throughout the game, and shown a video that sets their objective: to earn Edison’s respect—and entrance into his secret laboratory—by completing a series of mind-bending puzzles in the next 100 minutes.
Then they’re left alone. Sort of. Using the surveillance cameras and a panel of timers and buttons with adjustable game elements, staffers monitor players’ every move, zooming in on objects in the room or on players’ hands as they complete puzzles, to make sure the group is on track to make it to the finale.
The students have been told to station themselves at several small gold light bulb symbols on the walls and touch them simultaneously. What may seem like a simple task is, in fact, a sophisticated precursor to the rest of their game. Small sensors in the metal symbols detect the number of people in the room and customize the remaining challenges for that number. It also starts their game clock. “That’s the room’s technology paying attention to them,” says Linda.
Escape rooms gained popularity a little over a decade ago, with designers hailing from several distinct communities, including puzzle hunts, haunted houses, and interactive theater. The earliest rooms tended to have clichéd themes, like Egyptian crypts or prison breaks, and often required players to solve complex codes and puzzles that opened a series of combination locks and key locks. They offered few options for those who got stuck and contributed to an adversarial relationship between designers and players. “They would boast about how low the escape rate was, like, ‘Only 4 percent of people escaped this room,’” says Brent. “We never did that.”
Brent has always been more inspired by puzzles’ ability to fascinate, delight, and challenge. As a child, he once brought along a phone book–sized tome of puzzles while attending a party with his mother and sat, rapt, for hours. When he and Linda started dating at Stanford, she introduced him to The Game, a famous puzzle-solving race—or puzzle hunt—spanning 24 hours, requiring teams of puzzlers to drive around in pursuit of clues, like 51 cartons of ice cream whose scents required decoding, or underwater puzzles that required scuba gear to solve. The year after graduating, inspired by The Game, they began writing their own versions and gained a loyal following of problem-solving enthusiasts.
Many of those players hailed from the nearby tech world, among them Google co-founder Sergey Brin, MS ’95. Early Googlers often hired others from the puzzle-hunt community, knowing they “would stay up all night, work their tails off, have fun doing it,” Brent says.
In 2001, Brent stopped working as a creative writer and co-founded a puzzle-hunt company called Shinteki. (Linda kept her job as a zookeeper and worked at Shinteki part-time.) When Google needed an activity for summer engineering interns, puzzle pros on staff suggested reaching out to Shinteki.
With a tech giant as a major client, Linda quit her zookeeping job and the pair went all in creating experiences for individual and corporate customers. They still help run Shinteki today, with Brent as the company’s game master and Linda as the director of adventure.
In 2015, one of their clients, an entrepreneur named Chris Alden, left his job in venture capital to found his own escape room company, Palace Games, with Brent as its puzzler in chief.
Survive and Advance
After Hamid pulls the golden summoning rope in the Edison Room and gets a hint from the staffer, the students begin furiously rearranging the jars.
“I felt like I was in Squid Game,” says Hudson. “You know the steps you need to take, and you just have to do them, but also you want to rush, but you can’t rush.”
Though it’s difficult to describe Edison without leaking spoilers, one key to its success is that every group has a unique experience. The room—old though it may look—is a technological feat that adapts based on both the number of people in the room and the speed at which they solve puzzles. “We won’t let you fail at the room,” says Brent. Timed hints will be deployed in increasingly obvious ways if a group is struggling (and refuses to pull the summoning rope), and sensors become more forgiving as the seconds tick by.
“The Edison Room is one of the most technically interesting games I think I’ve ever played,” says Richard Bragg, ’00, MS ’02, who has completed more than 1,300 escape rooms and once held the Guinness World Record for most rooms attended in one day (22). Bragg, a former software engineer at Google, first played a Holman-designed game in Las Vegas, where Brent had designed an elaborate 48-hour puzzle hunt that at one point involved a secret casino that he and his team had built at the end of a dirt road in the desert.
LIGHT BULB MOMENTS: Students puzzle through the Edison Room, inspired by the 1915 world’s fair in San Francisco. (Photo: Flavien Bernardin)
Bragg is the creator of a global ranking system for escape rooms. Each year, he invites about 2,000 escape room enthusiasts who have played a minimum of 200 escape rooms each to nominate their favorites; those who have played 100 or more may then rank them. Although there are 50,000 to 100,000 escape rooms worldwide by Bragg’s estimate, he’s never surprised to see Brent’s rooms at the top of the list. “He is one of the most amazing puzzle-solving minds that I know,” says Bragg. “He’s got a really unique combination of creativity and analytical ability.” In 2019, the Edison Room reached its peak ranking of fifth in the world.
For Bragg, the best rooms today are those that have helped change the very meaning of the term escape room. Rather than breaking out of a room, he looks forward to escaping from reality as he’s forced to be present, absorbed by challenge or fear or drama. “There’ve been a few escape rooms that have had such moving things that it’s made me cry,” he says. “If you can make me cry, you’re automatically shooting to the top of the list.”
In game design theory, that complete absorption is called a flow state, a concept borrowed from psychology. “Flow is the concept in game design where you want the challenge to get harder as the player gets better,” says Scott Nicholson, a professor of game design and development at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, who has studied escape rooms for the past decade. This, he says, enables a flow state. “Time goes away. They’re fully challenged. They’re fully immersed.”
When it comes to escape rooms or puzzles, like sudoku, a flow state can occur as the game hits the perfect spot between boredom and stress, which Robert Sapolsky calls “stimulation.” A professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery at Stanford, Sapolsky says stimulation represents a motivating and rewarding “fulcrum of ‘maybe,’” when you encounter something you think (but are not sure) you might be able to conquer.
This is the balance that the Holmans aim to strike with their rooms: Too easy and players get bored, too difficult and they get frustrated, but if a room is calibrated just right, the players remain intellectually enveloped in a puzzling masterpiece, emerging victorious with mere minutes to go.
End Game
Nearing the end of the game, the students appear to be in a flow state. They’re completing tasks as one, screaming louder at triumph, sighing more audibly at frustration. As the timing bell rings out 80 minutes in, they still haven’t figured out a key element of the room. Then Dalvie has a realization. “Wait, everyone stand still,” she says. “No one move.”
Two common archetypes slow teams down: loud-but-wrong person and quiet-but-right person.
Students tend to have an advantage in escape rooms, says Linda. “They’re used to group projects and working in teams, and they’re also used to following instructions or reading, and those things matter.” The Stanford students voice their thought processes and approach each puzzle collectively, which helps propel them through challenges that other groups sometimes struggle with.
“Communication is paramount to success in a room,” says Brent. “The teams that do the worst are the ones who think they have one leader who knows how to do everything.” He sees two common archetypes that slow teams down: loud-but-wrong person and quiet-but-right person. It’s important for teammates to talk to one another, he says, and to listen. Success in an escape room requires everyone to notice things around the room, tell their teammates when they see something that might matter, and figure out how things other people notice might connect to something they’re seeing.
Upon making a key discovery, the students erupt into cheers and laughter.
“That is the desired effect of this room,” says Linda, watching them on the surveillance cameras. “Belly laughs.”
As they work through the final challenge, the timer is relentless: 99 minutes, 31 seconds; 99 minutes, 32 seconds. “We’re going to get a really big reaction from this last one,” says a staffer as the audio feed crackles from the students’ shouts. “They’re going to be really loud once they notice what’s happening.” With a flurry of activity that Linda says leaves groups in Edison sweatier than those in any other room, they solve one last puzzle and voilà: They’ve escaped from the room. The clock on the wall freezes on their final time: 100 minutes, 27 seconds.
THEY WORKED THE ROOM: Oke, Hudson, Bansal, Hamid, Sarmenta, Dalvie, and Garg. (Photo: Flavien Bernardin)
“It was satisfying,” says Sarmenta. “You felt the sequence of different puzzles. The way that you move through the room, you feel your progress really physically.”
“I was honestly a little mad,” says Hamid. “27 seconds over.” Still, he gives the experience high marks. “It felt a little magical, not gonna lie. Honestly, this is the best escape room I’ve been in.”
Some of the top escape rooms in the world no longer have a timer at all, and Palace Games doesn’t pull people out of a room if they exceed the goal time. The true goal is not to beat the clock but to work together, bring your unique strengths to bear, and celebrate your intelligence as a team. Palace Games has debuted two more offerings since Edison as customer appetites continue to evolve—their fifth and newest, Lollyland, is a blend of puzzles and mini golf.
But the biggest puzzle, the one Bragg still hasn’t figured out, is how the Holmans turned a hobby like puzzle hunting into a day job. “I’m kind of jealous of how they’ve been able to do that,” he says. In the same way that Brent designed the 48-hour Las Vegas puzzle hunt and one of the best escape rooms in the world, he’s designed his career: “He has the ability to come up with a crazy idea and then just keep at it until it works.”
—Kali Shiloh
On The Grid
A crossword constructor’s collaborative corner.
Jeff Chen grew up on Games magazine, which sounds like an obvious origin story for one of the most prolific creators in American crosswording. But back then, Chen, ’93, MS ’94, mostly flipped past the magazine’s crosswords on his way to its logic problems. “I just mostly skipped them because they looked kind of boring,” he says.
It was only decades later, after meeting his future wife in 2008, that Chen fell for the thrill of filling a grid to the last letter. On dates, they’d go to a coffee shop, each with a copy of the New York Times Sunday crossword. “She would be done in 15 minutes; I would not be done in three hours, but she was really patient,” Chen says. “I just kept on improving and improving, and one day I decided I was going to try and make one, and she thought it was a little crazy.”
Chen (Photo: Chelon Ione Towner)
Crosswording is an unusual corner within publications like the New York Times. Open submissions mean anyone can get a byline, but the competition is accordingly fierce. One of Chen’s strengths is an ability to pivot, undeterred by rejection, says his wife, Jill Denny (“or maybe he's deterred for, like, six hours”). After college, Chen worked as a mechanical engineer for nearly a decade before getting an MBA and retooling as a co-founder of a pharmaceutical company. Business success allowed him to tack again, and he plunged into crosswords with typical gusto. “If I’m not 110 percent busy, I feel like I’m wasting opportunity,” he says.
In July 2009, Chen had his first puzzle published in the Los Angeles Times. Cracking the New York Times took only slightly longer. The challenge, he says, was finding a fresh theme, the unifying thread required in most of the paper’s puzzles. After 20-plus rejections, Chen broke through thanks to a phrase Denny recalled from a childhood board game: The game is afoot. That led to a puzzle built on words that could be read as parts of the body, placed where such a body part might be: afoot at the bottom, ahead up top, and so on. It appeared under both of their names on July 5, 2010.
The puzzle would prove characteristic Chen: a layered theme mixing word and grid play. And he has been a force in crosswords ever since its publication. From 2013 to 2023, he was the blogging voice of xwordinfo.com, a trove of daily crossword reviews and analytics. He continually curates a list of more than 28,000 words and phrases that have never appeared in the New York Times crossword, which other constructors pay $200 to access. (“I write down everything,” he says. “It can drive the people around me crazy so I often ‘go to the bathroom’ so new phrases don’t evaporate before I can log them.”) And he’s one of the most prominent constructors in the business. “He’s like a juggernaut in terms of producing really high-quality crosswords,” says David Steinberg, ’19, who edits the syndicated Universal Puzzle and who has published more than 100 New York Times puzzles.
But perhaps Chen’s most distinctive trait harks back to that first New York Times puzzle: 15 years later, he remains the ultimate collaborator. Of the 162 puzzles he had published in the New York Times as of mid-May—a number that puts him among the 20 most prolific crossword makers in the paper’s history—114 were under a shared byline, many with total neophytes. “I enjoy helping people chase their bucket-list item of publishing a crossword,” he says. “What more could you ask for than seeing people’s dreams come true?” (For your chance, complete the custom crossword challenge Chen created for Stanford.)
Carolyn Davies Lynch, MA ’08, MBA ’08, is among them. In November 2022, going crazy with boredom while isolating with COVID, Lynch rediscovered a love of solving puzzles. Soon she was trying to make her own. In early 2023, she emailed Chen, asking for advice. To her surprise, Chen asked if she wanted to finish a grid that he had seeded but that was far from completion.
Over a series of 116 emails—they never spoke—Lynch would share screenshots of her progress and Chen would offer feedback on what worked, when language was too arcane, or where the puzzle was leaning into trivia that crossword cognoscenti could deem obvious or dull. For Chen, the delight of crosswording isn’t filling out answers that rely on knowing facts, but on decoding wordplay. Their collaboration ran in February 2024. “My sense was there was nothing special about me,” says Lynch, who has since published puzzles in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today, and elsewhere. “He just says that to everyone, and then whoever actually takes him up on it, he digs in and just goes off to the races.”
Chen remains intellectually peripatetic. He has written two fiction books for middle school readers and a puzzle book as part of the wildly popular Spy School kids’ series, and he’s developed an online game, à la Wordle and Spelling Bee, called Squeezy, his entrée into the mobile sector he sees as the future of gaming. “Short bursts of daily puzzly activity is where the puzzle world is headed, and I’d love to be more part of that,” he says. He credits his output less to waiting for moments of inspiration than to grinding out ideas. “I tell newer constructors that often the best advice is that quantity leads to quality.” Indeed, if there’s a unifying theme to his successes, Denny says it might be his sitzfleisch, a German term that essentially means the ability to park one’s butt in a chair and work. It’s an evocative expression that has yet to make its debut in the New York Times crossword, but an appearance could be divisive. Some solvers love learning a new word or showing off their familiarity with it, Chen says. Others get grumpy about proper nouns, non-English words, initialisms, and so on. “Crossworders are a particular bunch!”
—S.S.
Assembly Required
These aren’t your grandparents’ jigsaw puzzles. They’re the modern equivalent.
Liberty Puzzles co-founder Chris Wirth is used to online comments on his wares, asking how a jigsaw puzzle could cost so much. The question, he says, rarely gets asked by someone who has touched one.
Liberty puzzles ($30 to $245) come out of their tissue wrap with a whiff of campfire, a vestige of the laser-cutting process that carves nearly quarter-inch-thick boards of poplar and maple into exquisitely ornate patterns. With flowing, often sprawling contours, Liberty’s pieces are far more varied than those of cardboard puzzles, and about a fifth of them–“whimsy pieces”—are shaped like characters, animals, and figures that riff on the puzzle’s image. The freeform designs reveal themselves in the piece counts. Liberty puzzles tend to have, say, 532 pieces rather than the round numbers we expect in puzzles cut along grids. And they’re much thicker. “You plunk a piece into place and it’s very satisfying,” Wirth, ’90, says. “They’re designed to last generations.”
Chris Wirth (Photo: Liberty Puzzles)
Indeed, the inspiration for Liberty Puzzles was intergenerational. When Wirth was a teen, his mother shared a collection of dozens of hand-cut wooden puzzles from the 1930s with him and his sister, Kelsey, MBA ’97. The puzzles became mainstays on family vacations, and in 2003, Wirth was huddled over one with his brother-in-law on a rainy day in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, when a light bulb went on. “I was like, what is this thing?” he says. “This is not really just a jigsaw puzzle; this is a whole social experience—it’s a social vehicle,” he says. “I bet if I could make and sell these things for about a hundred bucks, that might be a good business.” So he ditched his finance career and set up a company with a friend, Jeff Eldridge, in their hometown of Boulder, Colo.
It took the two a year to develop modern ways to create old-style puzzles. They made their first sale—a print by 19th-century Japanese artist Hiroshige—on eBay on August 20, 2005. It was, in retrospect, an ironic moment to go analog. Facebook was getting started, the iPhone was nearing, and the digital age was dawning to general delight. The future was here, and it looked fun. The timing, however, proved prescient, Wirth says, as the audience for off-screen alternatives began to grow. Other companies would follow their lead.
THE BIRDS AND THE BUFFALO: Liberty’s wares include “whimsy pieces” that riff on each puzzle’s theme. (Photos: Dance of Spring (Song of the Birds), 1924 by Joseph Stella/Liberty Puzzles; Buffalo Moon by Brad Gorman/Liberty Puzzles)
Maya Gupta, MS ’00, PhD ’03, runs one of them. In 2009, she picked up a Liberty puzzle ahead of a flight to Hong Kong. It was intended as a gift, but she ended up doing it herself to pass the time, managing to assemble the 100 or so pieces on an economy-class tray table. She was entranced. “These wooden puzzles, they have very irregular shapes, so they’re much more difficult than cardboard puzzles and much more beautiful,” she says. “You’re spending half the time just admiring the sculptural beauty of the pieces.”
She bought more puzzles on her return and contacted Liberty to see whether she could invest, but they didn’t need outside funding. Ultimately, Gupta, then an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Washington, started her own laser-cut, wooden jigsaw puzzle company: Artifact Puzzles. Its offerings ($25 to $565) range from 16th-century Persian art to specially ordered illustrations that often are tinged with wry humor, like Modern Metaphors, an image by English artist Samuel Hayward that plays off figures of speech and represents Artifact’s biggest commission to date.
Maya Gupta (Photo: Artifact Puzzles)
The popularity of jigsaw puzzles corresponds historically with hard times. Sales of wooden puzzles reached their peak in the early days of the Great Depression as people looked for cheap, in-home entertainment. Fittingly for companies inspired by that era’s craftsmanship, Liberty and Artifact saw demand soar during the pandemic. During one stretch, Liberty would open its website for orders at 9 a.m., then shut it down five minutes later after reaching its daily production capacity of 400. Artifact experienced a similar surge in purchases, which crashed two weeks later when the company ran out of stock.
CREATURE COMFORTS: Artifact’s Gupta appreciates the sculptural beauty of wooden puzzles. (Photos from left: Octopus by Paul Bond/Artifact Puzzles; Coffee and Snacks by Emily C. Woodard/Artifact Puzzles)
That experience inspired Gupta, an AI expert, to create the Hoefnagel Puzzle Club (named for 16th-century Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel), which allows members to swap wooden puzzles thanks to machine-learning models that maximize postal efficiency and predict when members will need new deliveries. “We could make one puzzle and rent it to 10 puzzle-starved people,” Gupta told puzzle historian Anne Williams. The club—annual subscription $360—has grown postpandemic as aficionados discover its economic benefit. “Last year I did almost a hundred wooden puzzles,” says Becca Taylor, a competitive puzzle solver who works at Stanford. “It would have been tens of thousands of dollars to do all of these.”
And though demand for Liberty puzzles has subsided since the pandemic, Wirth says, the company emerged stronger. It’s in the process of moving into a new factory, one with a higher production capacity. He says the goal remains the same, however: providing the missing piece that gets people around a table together, “with screen off, music on, and maybe a bottle of wine.”
—S.S.
Perfect Fit
A puzzle prodigy finds her people.
Becca Taylor arrived at her first speed-jigsaw-solving contest in 2022 in Half Moon Bay expecting little more than the two things guaranteed by her entry fee—a glass of wine and a new puzzle. Winning seemed out of the question, especially when she saw another competitor in a “World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship” T-shirt. “I was like, ‘I am out of my league,’” she says. “I’m just gonna get my wine and have some fun and sit in the corner.”
INNER PIECE: Taylor’s superpower is her eye for shape. (Photo: Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University)
Instead, Taylor—the associate director of the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute—and her friend Lindsey Skrdlant surprised themselves by winning the pairs race by more than two minutes.
Perhaps she should have been less surprised by her success. When she was around 5 and ill with chicken pox, her parents gave her a 5,000-piece puzzle of a cheetah and lion to distract her from scratching. She finished in less than a week. As she got older, her mother was the only family member willing to puzzle with her. Her brother and father begged off. “When you’re with someone who has a natural talent for puzzles, and they’ve put in 15 pieces while you’re still looking for one, it’s super demoralizing,” Taylor says. Her family routinely got her the hardest puzzles they could find for Christmas.
Still, puzzle prodigies don’t necessarily end up on pedestals. Or at least they haven’t historically. But speed jigsaw solving has been burgeoning since the pandemic, and Taylor’s win thrust her into the arena nationally, then internationally. For Taylor, it was a joyous initiation. “It was really nice to just meet this massively diverse group of people who had entirely different day jobs and then, by night, we speed puzzle,” she says. Last September, she was part of a four-person team—the Busy Birdies—that won the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship in Valladolid, Spain, besting 300 teams by completing two 1,000-piece puzzles in one hour, 16 minutes, and 7 seconds. In other words, she earned her own T-shirt.
Taylor shared some techniques for the speed-curious.
Training matters.
Puzzles are a constant in Taylor’s life, but she hits a higher gear when she’s competing. “Leading up to worlds, I’ll usually be doing four to six 500-piece puzzles a day.” She focuses on the brand that will be featured at the contest, familiarizing her fingers with the die-cut of their pieces. “Each puzzle company is a little different.”
Flip out.
Speed puzzlers generally begin by racing to turn all the pieces face up while collecting edges, she says. “Super-fast people can flip and pull edges in a 500-piece puzzle in 2 ½ minutes,” she says. “I can barely break three.” Many use this stage for repeated glances at the puzzle image to fix it in mind.
Hedge the edge?
Like many lay solvers, competitive solvers will often prioritize the edge, but Taylor sometimes prefers to go for what she sees as lower-hanging fruit, like a distinct patch of color of about 10 to 30 pieces. She can come back to work the edges if she gets stuck. There’s no time to obsess over a missing piece. Constant motion is key.
Get into shape.
Taylor’s puzzling superpower is her eye for shape. In a team competition, she often faces the puzzle upside down, since image orientation matters less to her than to her partners. “When I can completely stop worrying about what the image is and just focus on the piece shapes, that’s when I go really fast.” She recommends sorting like colors by general shape.
Breathe.
Taylor feels no pressure in team events, but individual races can be excruciating. Some turn to music to relax. Taylor goes for breathwork. “Focusing on deep breathing while I am racing makes me much better,” she says. “I am going, ‘In, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4,’ the whole time.”
—S.S.
