Decisions have to be made fast: What’s the plan for sorting? By color? By texture? Pull out all the edges?
This is speed puzzling, and teams have to decide quickly what is their best bet for turning the 500 tiny pieces they just dumped out of a box into the picture on the cover — in minutes, not hours.
On Saturday, the relatively new Orange County Speed Puzzlers hosted its third competition. The winning time was 34 minutes 57 seconds, completed by Trisha Siedlecki of Roland Heights and Allyson Longo of Anaheim.
When the coronavirus arrived three years ago and people suddenly found themselves at home with a lot of time on their hands, many dusted off puzzle boxes that had been stashed away.
And when it got hard because of the shutdowns to buy more puzzles, they started trading with others to refresh their supply.
“There is a really great puzzle swap community in Orange County,” said William Shandling of Anaheim, who is a co-founder of Orange County Speed Puzzlers with Lisa Moskowitz.
Several from the local swap community attended the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association’s speed puzzling nationals in San Diego in October, Shandling said, and were interested in a regular competition closer to home.
So Moskowitz and Shandling teamed up and the first was held in February.
For Saturday’s competition, they got sponsorship from Ravensburger, a German toy company that has numerous puzzle lines.
But the company didn’t just pull 30 boxes of the same puzzle off a warehouse shelf, Shandling said. It surprised the organizers by offering to design a new puzzle for the competition, he said.
“It’s a really important step in the process, picking the puzzle for the competition,” he said. Along with being something that can be finished within time, it has to be fun for the puzzlers.
“We don’t want any diabolical puzzles where people are going to be frustrated,” Shandling said.
The organizers decided on a graphic arts motif, with a little April Fool’s twist…
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