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

SportsFebruary 17, 2024

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

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

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.

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.” 

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.”

‘Like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, each member is vital to the whole picture. Join today.’
Calum Henderson
— Production editor
Keep going!
New South Africa test captain Neil Brand (right) and Keegan Peterson playing for South Africa A in 2019 (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
New South Africa test captain Neil Brand (right) and Keegan Peterson playing for South Africa A in 2019 (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)

SportsFebruary 4, 2024

Who are these cricketers and what have they done with the South African test side?

New South Africa test captain Neil Brand (right) and Keegan Peterson playing for South Africa A in 2019 (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
New South Africa test captain Neil Brand (right) and Keegan Peterson playing for South Africa A in 2019 (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)

The ‘C team’ sent to play the Black Caps in a two-test series is a sign of the strange times international cricket is in. But while it may look a mismatch on paper, rookie captain Neil Brand promises his side won’t go down without a fight.

A scheduling “balls-up” is how South African cricket coach Shukri Conrad described it; a “fiasco” screamed a prominent columnist; a “defining moment in the death of test cricket” according to Australian legend Steve Waugh. Before even a single ball has thudded into the Bay Oval pitch, negative descriptors of varying severity have piled at the feet of this South African team, as outrage that its big-name players have had to skip the tour in order to play in their country’s T20 competition, the Betway SA20, has rippled through the cricket world. 

“Massive pride,” counters stand-in captain Neil Brand, speaking to The Spinoff a couple of days before his test debut – a pride undiminished, he says, by the circumstances of the team’s selection. “Every time you wear that Proteas shirt, it comes with a certain responsibility and a certain amount of pressure. So we know that, and we are definitely going to try our best to compete with the Black Caps for as long as possible.”

It’s an answer that hints at the scale of the challenge for Brand’s team. “A mismatch” is how South African sportswriter Daniel Gallan describes the prospect of the series, during which vital World Test Championship (WTC) points are on offer. “It’s not this David versus Goliath contest, but it’s obviously not that far off.”

Strange, in the context of these two teams, for the Black Caps to be identified with that Biblical heavyweight; New Zealand has never won a test series against the South Africans in its 17 previous attempts. But these are strange times for international cricket, with domestic T20 franchise leagues making increasingly vociferous demands on the calendar’s finite resources – and in the instance of this tour siphoning the cream of South African talent into the SA20 and away from what would under normal circumstances be a marquee series, at least from a New Zealand perspective. Only seven of the 14 members of the touring squad have played test cricket before; the most experienced, Duanne Olivier, played the last of his 15 tests nearly two years ago. 

Gallan provides some context. Cricket South Africa (CSA), he says, has long been plagued by what he calls “maladministration” – former CEO Thabang Moroe was fired for “serious misconduct” in 2020 – and then Covid and its complications intervened to further diminish the organisation’s finances. CSA was “broke”, and into this breach flowed money from the Indian Premier League, whose franchise owners proposed the basic tenets of the SA20. The catch, Gallan says, was that the teams would be owned by Indian franchises, they’d be named after Indian franchises, and – crucially – that South Africa’s centrally contracted players would be available to compete. 

Duanne Olivier, the most experienced member of South Africa’s test squad with 15 caps (Photo: Steve Bardens/Getty Images)

The New Zealand tour had been scheduled, according CSA, before the window for the SA20 had been determined. When it became clear there would be a clash, New Zealand Cricket resisted overtures to move the series – not least because of the impending inbound Australian tour that follows and the looming presence of this year’s IPL, beginning in March, which would’ve then taken players from both teams out of the equation. The result of it all is what Gallan terms “a C team”: no Kagiso Rabada, Aiden Markram, Marco Jansen, Anrich Nortje or Keshav Maharaj, to name a few. “If I were a Kiwi cricket fan I’d feel quite pissed off,” Gallan says. “I’d probably feel disrespected even.” 

It represents perhaps the most egregious example yet of an economic reality that most test-playing nations have to grapple with: test cricket almost always runs at a loss, and without T20 broadcast riches to fill that deficit, the longest form of cricket would be in serious trouble, especially outside of the so-called Big Three of England, Australia and India. (The latter of which, on the back of the IPL and the enormous broadcast revenue its huge domestic market provides, is becoming more and more The Big One.) As former New Zealand coach Mike Hesson, who later became the director of cricket for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the IPL, has previously said to me: “Test cricket would not survive and would not be alive now, outside of the major nations, if T20 didn’t exist to be able to generate the revenue to promote Test cricket.” In Gallan’s words, the SA20 is “keeping the lights on” for cricket in South Africa, a point also made by Brand: “At the end of the day, the SA20 is something that cricket desperately needs to survive.”

Within the team, he says, little has been said of the hand wringing that has occurred outside it. His squad is in “a great space” after two weeks in the country. Much of the team played together under Brand’s captaincy in the recent South Africa A versus West Indies A series – won 2-1 by the Africans – and Brand says the players are building on the culture that core had already established. For Brand, the messaging to his team has just been to “do what you’ve been doing, play the way you’ve been playing. It has to be good enough now.” It sufficed against West Indies A – and many of those West Indian players would go on to star in the recent test series against Australia, in which a West Indies team similarly denuded by leading players’ T20 commitments was able to topple the Australian WTC champions at a ground, the Gabba, that has traditionally been one of its strongholds. It was a result virtually no one saw coming.

Gallan expects this South African team to be galvanised by the outside noise and notes that some of these players will “walk out there maybe feeling like these are the only two tests they’ll ever play for their country. There’ll be no shortage of pride and desire.” But the true challenge, he says, will come when the pressure mounts: when confidence corrodes in the face of a fluent Kane Williamson century, say, or under a barrage of Kyle Jamieson bouncers, and the mind becomes fertile ground for doubts to bloom. Thoughts that ‘Oh shit, we are a C team, we don’t belong here’ might become too persistent to fend away.

But as Gallan says this is a group of tough, professional cricketers; and as the West Indies recently proved, it’s not only in the Bible that the little guy can triumph. Win the toss, take a couple of quick wickets, then who knows? And Brand is very conscious of the unblemished record he is defending. “We’d be very disappointed if we don’t keep it that way. Put it that way. And we’re doing everything that we can to keep that record intact.”

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