It's Puzzling

For the past two weeks we’ve been casually working on a 1000 piece puzzle that Danielle gave Don for Christmas. As its name, Wasgij?, (“jigsaw” spelled backwards) implies, this is no ordinary puzzle from the Piccolo Mondo toy store where Danielle works. Rather, it challenges the players’ accepted perspectives by portraying, not the picture printed on the box, but the point of view of something or someone in the picture. Huh? Yeah, that’s what we thought, too.

So, basically, the picture on the front is very little help other than setting up the context for whatever the puzzle will ultimately portray. Adventurous puzzlers must then resort to relying on colors, lines, and shapes to begin piecing the mystery together.

I have a kind of love/hate relationship with jigsaw puzzles. I am fascinated with them, but get so obsessed with finding the pieces that periodically I have to get up and walk away to avoid screaming. Intrepidly, Don and I started this new one and, about halfway through, began to hypothesize and then finally see what was happening in the picture, but it still didn’t get much easier. I must say that there was more than the usual sense of triumph when the Wasgij was finished. Although younger children could piece the puzzle together merely by matching and still benefit from the planning, comparing, evaluating, and predicting skills that they utilize, I think it would be even more valuable for challenging the developing abstract thought processes of adolescents. The idea of trying to analyze and predict someone else’s point of view based on building clues is a good mental exercise that would parlay well into a discussion on globalism.

For now, however, I’m just glad this mystery is solved and my sanity is still intact. I wonder what challenge will be next.