Speed puzzling at the 2024 Masters Games (Design: Tina Tiller)

SportsJanuary 1, 2025

Getting jiggy with it: Inside the wild world of competitive speed puzzling

Staff writer

Speed puzzling at the 2024 Masters Games (Design: Tina Tiller)

Summer reissue: If you thought jigsaw puzzles were meant to be relaxing, think again. Tara Ward lifts the lid on one of the Masters Games’ most intense and demanding events.

The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a member today.

After nearly three fervid hours of puzzling, it has come down to this. Inside the Union food hall at the University of Otago, two teams are neck-and-neck. In front of them, a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Beside them, the last few stubborn pieces. Four pairs of hands move frantically across each table, rushing to connect the final pieces of sky and trees. A buzz of anticipation fills the room. Officials hover in the aisles, stopwatches in hand, ready to pounce. The small crowd of spectators shift their heads from left to right like they’re watching the final at Wimbledon, craning their necks to see which team will claim glory first. A single, precious puzzle piece lies silently on the floor, lonely and forgotten.

Every piece is crucial. Every second counts. Welcome to the wild world of competitive jigsaw racing.

Puzzlers battle it out in the teams speed puzzling race (Photo: Armstrong Photography)

Competitive speed puzzling is exactly as it sounds: a race to finish a jigsaw the fastest. It’s the intriguing sport that turns a relaxing hobby into an intense, adrenaline-fuelled challenge, testing players’ mental agility, concentration and attention to detail under pressure. Jigsaw racing is growing in popularity as more of us discover the health benefits of puzzling, with numerous speed puzzling events held both virtually and in person around the world. Fifty countries were represented at last year’s World Puzzling Championships in Spain, where the winning team finished two 1000-piece puzzles in an astonishing one hour and 30 minutes.

Now, it’s Dunedin’s turn. Over two days in the New Zealand Masters Games, jigsaw athletes are competing for glory in team and individual categories, sprinting to build a 1000-piece puzzle in a matter of hours. It’s the first time jigsaw racing has featured at the Dunedin games, after it debuted at the Whānganui Masters in 2021. Players filing into Dunedin’s vast jigsaw arena range in age from their 20s to their 70s, travelling from as far as Auckland’s New Lynn to compete. In the world of speed puzzling, jigsaws aren’t just for the old or boring – and nor for the faint of heart.

An unexpected scandal unfolds in the nervous moments before the Dunedin event begins. As teams enter the puzzle pitch, one over-excited team begins to unwrap their jigsaw early, breaking a cardinal rule of competitive puzzling. Only after a hearty 10 second countdown (which the entire room joins in on) are the 21 teams permitted to feverishly rip off the paper to reveal the hidden jigsaw image. It’s a moment that will define the next four hours. A picture with bright colours and crisp shapes is best for speed puzzling, while large areas of sky or land – spaces that look the same – are not.

Once these puzzlers clap eyes on their jigsaw, a quiet groan echoes around the room. This is not a puzzle built for speed.

See you in my nightmares: the team and individual jigsaw puzzles at the Dunedin Masters Games

“Unfortunately for me, the image on the puzzle dictates whether or not I’m gonna have fun,” Donnalouise Gragg foreshadows before the event. The Dunedin woman is one of New Zealand’s most experienced puzzlers, having assembled a 54,000 piece puzzle in her own home and attended both the World Puzzling Championships and the Australian Jigsaw Puzzle Association Nationals last year. Having placed 23rd out of 160 competitors in Australia, Gragg describes herself as a “mid-range” speed puzzler – not in the bottom, but not in the top, either. “A lot of people think I’m really fast, but on a world scale, people can do a 500-piece in 30 minutes. I don’t know how. That blows my mind.”

‘Like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, each member is vital to the whole picture. Join today.’

Calum Henderson
— Production editor

It’s game on for Gragg’s team The Dunedin Dissectologists, with a frenzy of activity in the first few minutes. Alongside teams like We Come in Pieces, The Jig(Saw) is Up and Getting Jiggy With It, they eagerly flip and twist their pieces into order, organising them in oven trays and colourful plastic containers bought from home. Sorting is key to successful speed puzzling, with competitors searching for patterns, colours and shapes from the moment the pieces are tipped from the box.

For the next four hours, puzzlers keep a laser focus on the thousand tiny pieces of cardboard scattered in front of them. Their fingers move nimbly, eyes shifting, backs bent as the Cardrona Hotel begins to form. The Dissectologists keep their heads down, all four members confident in their own role. “We’re always talking about the image, and saying are we full sorting? Are we full flipping? Who’s working on what?” Gragg says. They’ve been puzzling together for about two months, but ramped up their practice over the past few days, completing five 1000-piece puzzles together. “Maybe we’ve overprepared, I don’t know,” Gragg worries.

Donnalouise Gragg (right) with her team Dunedin Dissectologists (Photo: Armstrong Photography)

It’s a stark contrast to the action in the corner, where Team Bird and Chook have laid out their snacks (carrots, cake and chocolate) and are laughing their way through their puzzle. Best friends Toni Kennedy (Bird was a childhood nickname) and Kim Lammond (her mum calls her Chook) arrive wearing the matching T-shirts they had specially made for the event, a sartorial vision of birds, rainbows and unicorns. They both enjoy puzzling for its calming, mindful qualities, with Kim discovering that jigsaws helped to ease the anxiety she experienced during breast cancer treatment.

Bird and Chook know they won’t feel that usual sense of calm today, but they’re focused on finishing under the four hour limit. Mostly, they’re here to have a good time. “We’re not pros, we’re just people who like puzzles,” Lammond explains. As one of the few teams of two, they’re realistic about their chances of winning, but wonder if their high energy and constant chatter might work as a strategy. “Like on The Amazing Race, when the couples yell at each other and the others get deterred,” Lammond reckons, explaining how they celebrate every tiny piece that slots into place. “We’re like ‘man, this looks SO good!’”

Charlotte McKay is another puzzler who loves the meditative power of jigsaws. “It’s great downtime, but I still feel like my brain is activated. There’s always something achievable about doing a jigsaw,” she says. The performer, fitness coach and office manager has been passionate about puzzling for 20 years, and the opportunity to enter the individual jigsaw race was a dream come true. “I am quite a competitive person, and when I heard about this, I’ve never felt more seen. Competitive jigsaw puzzling? That’s my nirvana.”

Previously, McKay’s biggest challenge had been her cat vomiting on her puzzle; now she’s about to compete against 20 other individuals through nine hours of intense, sustained puzzle action. McKay can knock a 1000-piece puzzle off in a few hours at home, but after watching lots of jigsaw racing videos online, she knows speed puzzling demands a more purposeful, efficient approach. “I really thought when I entered, ‘I’m an ace puzzler, I’m going to have a gold medal’,” she jokes. “Then when I actually found out that this is a whole thing, I’m like, ‘oh noooo’.”

Chook (Kim Lammond, left) and Bird (Toni Kennedy) having a lovely time (Photo: Armstrong Photography)

As the Dunedin summer sun begins to beam through the University food hall, players mutter about the shadows the sunlight casts on their pieces. It will reach 31C in Dunedin today, and after the first hour, a stuffy hush falls on the room. By the second, puzzlers are beginning to hurt. They shift around their tables, swapping positions when a team member hits a jigsaw wall, pausing to stretch their necks and backs. “I’m achieving nothing,” one says. “I need the roof of the car,” another pleads. “It’s a shitshow,” Lammond tells Kennedy, searching for a matching piece of that never ending winter sky.

An older woman with hair the same colour as the Cardrona snow plonks herself down in a plastic chair to watch. “I’ve just finished playing table tennis,” she announces to the captivated group of spectators who’ve gathered. Strangers on the sidelines quickly become friends, as people pull out their phones to show off photos of their favourite jigsaws (Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a classic). It’s this instant bond that Gragg loves the most about puzzling. “At Worlds, people don’t speak the same language, but put a jigsaw puzzle down on the table and people will just gravitate,” she says. “You don’t even need to speak and you’re having a good time.”

That day, nobody had a better time than Dunedin Dissectologists. Two hours, 41 minutes and 21 seconds after the jigsaws were unwrapped, the four puzzlers raise their hands in the air, triumphant and exhausted. Team Tabulous finish second a mere two minutes and 51 seconds later, while Bird and Chook persist with that bleak Central Otago sky until the bitter end. The following day, McKay will give a spectacular display of stamina in the individual race, enduring nine gruelling hours of puzzling to solve a 1000-piece jigsaw of Larnach Castle so challenging that other competitors leave in tears.

Regardless of the results, puzzling was the winner on the day. NZMG manager Vicki Kestila admits she wasn’t sure what to expect with jigsaw racing, but was quickly won over. “We were blown away by how popular it was in terms of participation but also by how many spectators it attracted,” she says. “People were fascinated by the ins and outs of it all.”

Even the victorious Gragg, who’s preparing to return to the World Championships in Spain later this year, says the most important thing about competitive puzzling is that everyone has a good time. Bird and Chook agree. “If we don’t enjoy it, then what’s the point?” Kennedy/Bird asks. And what about McKay, who never wants to see a photo of Larnach Castle ever again? “I hope that I’m subverting somebody’s stereotype about what a jigsaw puzzler is,” she says. “Even though this is the Masters Games, jigsaw puzzling can be cool, kids.”

First published February 17, 2024.

Keep going!

Image: Tina Tiller

SportsDecember 25, 2024

The need for speed: What I learnt competing in an online jigsaw puzzle competition

Calum Henderson

Production editor

Image: Tina Tiller

Summer reissue: Speed puzzling is like a marathon for the mind – intense, demanding, surprisingly exhausting. But does turning it into a sport destroy it as a relaxing pastime?

The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a member today.

First published June 15, 2024.

Watching the highlights of the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship makes me want to be sick. Dozens of teams in matching T-shirts swarm around tables in a brightly-lit convention centre, working in unison to assemble 1000-piece jigsaws with the ruthless efficiency of Formula 1 pit crews. When they finish the puzzle they don’t even stop to admire the picture – instead, they immediately fold the pieces back into the box and start on a new one.

This is speed puzzling, a sport on the rise internationally and here in Aotearoa. It takes one of the most peaceful and relaxing activities ever invented and turns it into an intense and stressful white-knuckle race against the clock. As someone who enjoys doing jigsaw puzzles slowly and as mindlessly as possible, I find the whole concept kind of appalling. Why must everything be turned into a competition all the time?

I share these concerns with the person who sent me the link: Adele Bryson is the chair of the recently-established New Zealand Jigsaw Puzzle Association, which is preparing to host the country’s first jigsaw puzzle Nationals in Auckland in July. She counters by extending an invitation: why don’t I take part in their first official online event in a couple of weeks and see if I don’t change my mind?

The puzzle arrives at work on a Wednesday morning, wrapped in a pale pink recyclable mailer. A large sticker on the back reads: “ONLINE SPEED PUZZLE COMPETITION … DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 8 JUNE 2024”.

I do as the sticker says. “No peeking” is one of the fundamental rules of speed puzzling – whether in person or online, it’s important that everybody lays eyes on the puzzle for the first time together, usually just before the race begins.

On the afternoon of 8 June, a Saturday, I return to the empty office. I place a chair on a table, then put my laptop on the chair at an angle that allows the camera a clear and uninterrupted view of my “puzzling surface”. Then I click the button to ask to be let into the Google Meet.

There are around 20 other people on the call. I can’t see any of them except for Adele, who’s one of the organisers for this event – her primary responsibilities include admin, keeping a watchful eye over everybody’s puzzling surface to ensure none of us are breaking any rules, and giving me a fright every 30 minutes by announcing how much time we have left.

Once everybody’s cameras are pointing in the right direction, Adele invites us to unwrap the puzzle. It’s a 500-piece (the international standard for individual speed puzzling competitions) bold and funky modern floral design called “Lost in the Garden”. More experienced puzzlers than me will later describe it as “a tricky wee number” and “more challenging than I expected”.

We begin on the stroke of 3pm. My strategy, informed mostly by a list of tips and tricks I found on speedpuzzling.com, is to do more or less the opposite of what I’d normally do. Instead of tipping the pieces into the box, I dump them all out on the table. Instead of idly swishing my hand through the box until I find the piece I’m looking for, I begin what’s known as the “flip and sort” phase. And instead of feeling relaxed and content, I feel frantic and under the pump.

The race has a three-hour time limit – after that it comes down to a count of the pieces left to decide the final placings. I have set myself the goal of finishing within those three hours, something Puzzle YouTube has misled me into believing should be fairly easy.

The previous night I watched several videos made by a self-described “puzzle influencer” from the US who goes by the name Karen Puzzles. In one of them, she analysed the results of the 2022 World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship, where the individual final was won with a time of 34 minutes and 25 seconds by Alejandro Clemente from Spain, a staggering seven minutes ahead of the next fastest finisher, Norway’s Kristin Thuv.

The top two speed puzzlers in the world for the last two years, they have cartoonishly different styles: Alejandro moves incredibly fast, his hands like hummingbirds, while Kristin appears bored out of her mind, puzzling with one hand while resting her head against the other.

Kristin appears to be the outlier in terms of technique – most speed puzzlers use both hands – but she makes up for her lack of velocity with extraordinarily efficient sorting. I try to incorporate the best of both their techniques as I flip and sort my pieces, but puzzling two-handed is more difficult than it seems, like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time, and my sorting only gets as far as putting all the edge pieces in one pile and some “reddy bits” in another.

Around the time Alejandro or Kristin would be finishing their puzzles, I am still working on the edges of mine. I didn’t expect to be as fast as them, of course, but I didn’t realise I‘d be this much slower. The gulf between my pace and theirs is comparable to the gulf between my running pace and that of Eliud Kipchoge, the marathon runner whose feats are often described in terms like “not human” and “freak of nature”.

One hour, 10 minutes and 35 seconds in, an unscheduled and truly indescribable sound comes out of my laptop speaker, shattering the silence of the empty office and sending me into fight or flight mode. The first person has finished their puzzle. My puzzle looks like this:

Over the next hour, a spirit-breaking procession of speed puzzlers take turns to unmute their microphones, say “done”, hold up their time sheets to the camera so their results can be written down by someone, then say “thank you” and hop off the call.

Realising I have no idea exactly how many people there were to begin with, a fresh anxiety takes hold. Am I going to be the last to finish? Am I already the last to finish? Is this Google Meet now just Adele watching me try with growing desperation to fit puzzle pieces that clearly don’t go together, seemingly at random, for another hour?

I am not the only one with this fear, it turns out. “Am I the last one?” a forlorn disembodied voice asks. “No, there’s still a bunch of you,” Adele responds. “Keep going everybody, you’re all doing so well.” I feel like I could burst into tears, which, if I’m honest, is not an emotion I had anticipated feeling in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle competition.

I wouldn’t be the first person in the world to describe speed puzzling as a humbling experience – even Karen Puzzles says so in the title of one of her vlogs, and she does puzzles for a living. The closest thing I can find to compare it to – mentally and, surprisingly, physically – is the time I ran a half marathon. But that was over in two hours, and this is rapidly approaching three.

I started the puzzle sitting down, and expected to stay that way for as long as it took me to finish it. But for at least the last 90 minutes I’ve been standing, leaning over the table with roughly the same posture as the Pixar lamp in order to get a better overview. I allow myself a three-second microbreak to stretch like an actor in an ad for Voltaren Emulgel, imagining an alarming red aura emanating from my lower spine.

‘Like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, each member is vital to the whole picture. Join today.’

Calum Henderson
— Production editor

There are five of us still going as we head into the last 15 minutes. Then there are four. I am so close and yet so far from the finish line. One moment I think I might just sneak in under the three hours, then my momentum stalls and I think I’m definitely not going to make it. Then I go on a little run and place three or four pieces in a row and start to believe it might be possible again.

It’s like this right up to the final minute. Then something unexpected happens: Adele starts talking to one of the other organisers on the call, and they agree to throw the rulebook out the window and let us keep going for a couple of extra minutes. They can’t bring themselves to ask us to stop when we’re all so close.

The speed puzzling endorphins kick in as I get down to the last handful of pieces. My hands are flying like Alejandro’s, or at least it feels like they are. Finally, three hours and 56 seconds after starting, I have finished “Lost in the Garden”. The others in the trailing pack follow within a couple of minutes.

The last people to finish a marathon are often the happiest. In that moment, as we place our final pieces and stop our clocks, each of us gets to feel like we have won.

Why did I have such a strong negative reaction when I watched those highlights of the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship? I’ve had time to reflect on it, to really try and unpack those emotions, and I think it’s probably because I was scared.

So many things in life that used to bring me pleasure and excitement – CD shopping, provincial rugby, going on the computer – have had the joy sucked out of them by the inexorable march of progress. I was scared that the same thing would happen to jigsaw puzzles; that if I did one speed puzzle I’d never be able to feel relaxed while doing a puzzle again, consumed instead by some sick need for speed.

But that doesn’t appear to be how it works. These two different ways of doing a jigsaw puzzle are capable of coexisting – like walking and running, or, as Adele explained it to me, like swimming in the sea and swimming in a pool. If someone who loves speed puzzling so much they helped set up a national association for it can still find peace in doing a puzzle with the clock off, so can I. Maybe I’ll even break the elusive three hour mark one day too.