Summer Puzzle Tournament

Our first Summer Puzzle Tournament will take place on 11–12 July. The tournament’s six challenges will test competitors’ endurance and speed, strategic and tactical choices, and ability to perceive different image styles and shapes.

Each challenge adds time to the overall total, and the competitor with the lowest total time will be crowned the winner, with prizes for the three fastest!

We have received many questions about the tournament challenges, so we decided to introduce the event in a little more detail. The six challenges are:

DAY 1

Endurance (1000 pieces, 2h)

This challenge measures your ability to keep up the high pace throughout the puzzle.

We know that two hours is an ambitious goal for a 1000-piece puzzle, but it’s doable! We’ve chosen an easy to approach puzzle for this round and in case you wouldn’t solve the puzzle in time, you’ll get a result based on the number of pieces you’ve left (5 added per unsolved piece).

Tips for this challenge: make sure you have large enough table and assembly space! When you have enough space for the pieces and room for the puzzle, you don’t have to worry about space management and can fully focus on the speed. That actually really helps with completing 1000 pieces fast. You can also use two trays to help you with the space management. Another tip is to practice easy 1000-piece puzzles and focus on keeping up a good pace. And maybe listening to upbeat music also helps you…

Sprint (less that 500 pieces, 1,5h)

This challenge is for designed to measure your speed! To sum it up: less pieces = faster solve.

Tips: Practice with variety of small piece count puzzles, maybe even do a speed run of in order to see how fast you can go.

Shape challenge (500 pieces, 1,5h)

This challenge measures your shape work skills, and the ability to understand different kind of shapes and use that knowledge in solving the puzzle. In this puzzle, the shapes of the pieces are unconventional. By this we mean that the puzzle doesn’t have a typical grid cut. There are many reasons why the cut differs: it might be caused by the unusual shape of the puzzle or random cut design. The puzzle is also chosen so that the piece cut and the shapes are essential clues to solving the puzzle, in addition to the image.

Tips: Familiarize yourself with different piece cuts and practice solving puzzles using the shape of the pieces as your guideline.

DAY 2

Details (500 pieces, 1,5h)

This challenge measures your ability to make sense of the details and your ability to use the reference image as an guideline. This puzzle’s image is a detailed illustration, so it also measures your ability to work with illustrated color scheme.

Tips: Practicing busy puzzles, pick & placing and solving puzzles with the help of the reference image.

Photograph (500 pieces, 1,5h)

This puzzle’s image has larger areas of something and the challenge measures you ability to work with colors and textures, and your ability to use the pieces as your guideline rather than looking at the reference image.

Tips: Practicing photograph puzzles and seeking clues from the pieces. Unboxed training might also be good preparation for this chellenge, if you tend to lean on the image while solving.

Final surprise (500 pieces, 1,5h)

This challenge measures your strategic skills, decicion making and self knowledge. In speed puzzling, there’s many different approaches to a puzzle and even the opposite ways may lead to the same result – the most important is to know what works best for you and this is in the core of this challenge.

Tips: We recommend you to sit down and reflect a bit of your strengths and weaknesses. Think about your solving strategies and go through what kind of puzzles are easy for you, what are challenging, is there some mistakes you tend to do and what’s your unique talent as a puzzler.

Final words

To give you a versatile experience, all chosen puzzles represent different styles. Some challenges might push you to your limits, but others run smooth, depending on your skillset and unique strenghts. The challenges measure opposite approaches and solving ways, so it might be wise to focus on practising the things that feel difficult for you, in order to build a balanced skill set that helps you navigate throught the challenges with a steadily and consistently.

The event also requires some stamina, assembling this many puzzle pieces in such a short time is consuming, so please make sure that you eat enough and keep yourself hydrated during the event.

And last but not least, we hope we’ll also have some fun together!

Read more of the event here.