Staff pick: Mike Olenick on what he's been puzzling over

I’m always on the lookout for Columbus-themed puzzles. At times the architecture of the Wex can be puzzling, so it’s fitting that it’s been featured in at least two different jigsaw puzzles focused on Ohio State. Ohio State Campus, from 1990, even refers to the Wex by its original name: Wexner Center for the Visual Arts. The word “Visual” was dropped from our name by the time the 1992 Ohio State puzzle was published.

The shape of the pieces in these puzzles are examples of what’s called a random cut, which means the pieces don’t follow a regular grid pattern. I’m a big fan of random cut puzzles and I find that these erratic shapes contrast nicely with the orderly grids of Peter Eisenman’s architecture.

Both of these Ohio State puzzles feature a grid of events and landmarks from across campus, a few of which have changed dramatically over the years. This arrangement of photos is a common puzzle layout that’s easy for multiple people to work on simultaneously. Each puzzler can focus on a different area, such as the Wex or Mirror Lake, and then connect their completed sections to form the final image.

I’m doing a lot of puzzles by myself now, and that’s allowed me to work on different kinds. I really love the extra challenge of a random cut puzzle, and my favorite ones are conceptual puzzles from the mid 1960s to early 1980s. Little Red Riding Hood’s Hood (1964) is a 500-piece, all red, circular jigsaw puzzle made by Springbok. There’s no color variation, the round border has skinny pieces which are extremely difficult to sort from the rest of the puzzle, and it takes a lot of trial and error to put even two pieces together, let alone the whole puzzle. If that sounds maddening to you, you’re right: It is. The front of the box with its striking and minimal design even proclaims “The whole puzzle—maddeningly red!”

Right before the COVID-19 pandemic began, one of my most wanted puzzles, Chocolate Spilt Milk by Synergistics Research, popped up on eBay. I had been searching for it for years and I ordered it without hesitation. It was delivered to the Wex after we started working remotely and I had to head back to campus to grab it. The pandemic could not keep me from this puzzle, which is a solid shade of brown and shaped like a blob of liquid. Finding the edge pieces for this 330-piece puzzle was extremely hard, and the ways these pieces fit together were rarely obvious. And to make it even more challenging, many of these pieces snap together to form larger shapes that resemble normal grid cut puzzle pieces. I can usually complete a 500 to 1000-piece puzzle in a single sitting, but both this puzzle and Little Red Riding Hood’s Hood took me about two weeks each and required plenty of patience.

As an added bonus, Chocolate Spilt Milk comes in a box shaped like a milk carton. If you place the box on your table when you are done, it appears as if the puzzle has spilled out from the carton itself. Synergistics Research even made a companion puzzle, Spilt Milk, which is the same exact puzzle, but with 330 all white pieces.

My favorite puzzle of all time is considerably easier than those, though it’s still challenging. Amazing Maze (by Rainer K. Koenig) was manufactured by Springbok in the 1970s, and it was one of four concept puzzles they released at the time (the others were a crossword puzzle jigsaw puzzle, a mystery puzzle, and a personality test puzzle). The box for Amazing Maze doesn’t feature an image of the puzzle itself: instead it shows a model of a maze with people navigating their way through it. It’s an awesome pre-Photoshop collage with some rad, eye-catching typography.

The box doesn’t give away what’s hiding inside it: 500 random cut pieces, each one a beautiful abstraction of lines and bright colors. The foreground and background colors on many of the pieces have the same value, making the colors vibrate when you stare at them. The subtle gradations of color on the background and foreground of the pieces seem like they’d make the puzzle harder to complete, but they actually help visually guide you to the color combo of the adjacent pieces. The pieces themselves are really thick and stay firmly together, too. After I completed this puzzle I was able to grab it with one hand and carried it up a flight of stairs without it falling apart. It’s rare to find a puzzle made like this today.

Completing the puzzle is only half the fun: there’s still a maze to solve! Also included in the box is a crayon and a clear piece of vinyl so that you can solve the maze without ruining the puzzle itself. Every detail about the experience of putting this puzzle together was well thought out, from the box that doesn’t give away the actual maze to the color gradations of the pieces, to the final solution of the maze itself. Amazing Maze is a truly amazing puzzle from what I consider to be the golden age of puzzles.

As I write this I’m getting ready to work on a Yellow Flash and Black Diamond, a couple of Op Art puzzles from 1969 based on the paintings of Edna Andrade. If you want to see more, you can follow my puzzle progress on Instagram under the handle @letspuzzle.