Tag: puzzles

556: “Lookout For Enchanted Items” (Magic Puzzle Company)

                “Our yellow-suited hero has lost their friends in a vast enchanted maze. As you work your way through the rooms, look out for enchanted items that could help in your quest…”
                -“The Mystic Maze,” Magic Puzzle Company

                My partner and I are puzzlers. We like puzzles. We like the space above the pieces, shared and sweet as we look at the colors and the shapes. (That reminds me of Donald Hall’s “The Third Thing,” which made me think about looking at something together—side by side, not face to face—as a central practice for love). We like the colors and the shapes, the chatting and the time, the frustration—where does this piece go? If you figure it out tell me. We love the click of things settling into place. No surprise I suppose that I’ve posted about puzzles before. And this month the Magic Puzzle Company puzzles we’ve just found add layers to all these things we love.
                The three Magic Puzzle Company puzzles we’ve done lean into Where’s-Waldo-style image searches, themed characters, and small optical illusions when the sections of puzzle can separate and recombine. I won’t try to explain the mechanism more than that. Today I’m after something about the feel. A lot of my friends hate puzzles. I think I can understand (at least some of) the reasons why. Puzzles can feel like exhaustion, a grind, a trick someone’s not telling you— “I know how this goes together, but I’m going to make you shuffle around all these nick nacks before I tell you what’s already obvious.” And I see all that. There is so much, so much serious work to be done. Not against that, but alongside it, the Magic Puzzle Company highlights what else puzzles can be. An invitation to color and shape, story and character, world and time. A treasure hunt. A joke. A series of visual puns. An adventure someone’s inviting you toward. That’s true of puzzles, I think, and it’s also a reminder for how I approach other tasks.Take splitting firewood for winter: it can be exhausting, grueling, repetitive, endless. But it can also be something else. The axe swings. Lands. The wood shivers, or splits. A woodchip flies, and a robin does too, across the sky in front of me and up into the cedar. So much enchanted in this maze.

by Azlan

449: “Nuance” (a color gradient puzzle)

“English acquired ‘nuance’ from French, with the meaning ‘a subtle distinction or variation,’”
-from the box for “nuance,” a color gradient puzzle produced by Robert Frederick Ltd

                I don’t usually pay so much attention to color. Sometimes I do: my orange jacket is next to the orange foam roller I use to help relax the muscles of my back, and as I sit here thinking, I’m enjoying the difference in their shade. The way they’re both shadowed by the room’s one light. The way those shadows paint the pale cushion my jacket’s sitting on. But I probably drop my jacket there a lot, and the roam roller’s usually beside that cushion. I’m looking at them now because I’m thinking about this puzzle. 
                A couple years ago my partner and I did the puzzle together. Starting with the edge, like we usually do, and then the corners. I think about that sometimes, because early on I wasn’t at all sure I could do this puzzle. There were no lines to follow. No horizons, no lakeshores. But then doing the puzzle together turned into a playful game of feeling with our eyes: there’s a lot of green here, but what feels really green? Or in all these purple pieces, what feels really purple? And surprisingly often, looking at all these pieces, I had a feeling to follow along to a piece that fit. I think I’m remembering that tonight because I want to spend more time being open to the orangyness of the orange, the shadow of the cushion: the wash of changing color, luxuriant as paint washed along my skin.

by Azlan