Tag: puzzles

568: “Alice’s Route” (Juliet & Charles Snape)

                “Take Alice’s route as she chases the white rabbit down the hole…” -Juliet and Charles Snape, The Classic Tales Maze Book, page 1

                Tonight I’m at my mother’s house, and my little sibling (who’s not so little—several inches taller than me, for example) took The Classic Tales Maze Book off the shelf. I remember the mazes in this. Or more particularly, I remember the pictures: the giant puppies crouched in the woods, the tables laden with teacups and saucers, the rivers. I remember the stories: Alice in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote and Gulliver on his travels which I always skipped because I didn’t like it. 
                I remember lying on the floor, book open before me, running my fingers over the oceans and the fields and interlocking paths. Each two-page spread constructs a maze for you to follow along in the main character’s journey. Each spread also has a clever flap that folds back and forth, opening a room or cave you hadn’t seen before. I liked that part, but the paths of the maze confused me. A letter, lying across the path, is meant to block the road. So is the line of a roof if the perspective is drawn so that the path crosses behind the house. The mazes are put together for you to follow a completely uninterrupted line from place to place. As a kid, looking at them, that confused me. I thought you could step over the letter. I thought you probably could go around behind that house, and for that matter, you could cut across these open green fields. I would look in the back of the book to find the solution you were supposed to take, and then look at the pictures again, trying to backsolve why that way was the right way. 
                I liked this book. I fell into it. I was bewildered by it. In its colors and lines, I don’t think I was trying to understand mazes. I was trying to understand the signals and signs by which people say that some paths can’t be walked, and some paths must be.

by Azlan

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