What to do on National Puzzle Day

While January is Puzzle Month, January 29th is an annual celebration called National Puzzle Day.

National Puzzle Day has been celebrated for over 20 years, and every year it has been getting more people interested in puzzles and doing things to exercise their brain. I think for some puzzlers, every day is National Puzzle Day, but for others, it may be the moment that they dust off a puzzle in their pile to enjoy on their own or with a friend. Either way, we have some ideas for how you can make the most of this day.

1. Organize your puzzles! There are a lot of ways to organize your puzzles and we know some of our best puzzlers have closets that look like Jenga, and with the wrong puzzle pulled, that tower is coming down! So you can organize puzzles by brand. Or with some professional organizers, they like to arrange things by colour. Another option is to organize them by size and height. You could even organize them alphabetically, like library books - or take it one step further and group them into themes first, then alphabetically within its theme. 

2. Make a wish list of puzzles. You know you've spent time looking online at all kinds of wonderful puzzles and thought that you'd come back for that puzzle one day. Well, start making a list! Spend some time at a local retail store who carries lots of puzzles that you like. Write them all down on a list and keep them in a spreadsheet. Or, if you don't have a retailer near you, window shop online and find all the puzzles that you want. Make a spreadsheet with the name of the puzzle, the piece count, the theme (ie wildlife, collage, scenic), the brand, the cost, where you can buy it, and a quick description of why it attracted you ie "Love the floral arrangement in this one", or "It had metallic highlights on some of the images". 

3. Call a friend and set a puzzle date. Why not call your friend up who also enjoys puzzles and talk about doing a puzzle together in the future? You can plan a date where you either collaborate on assembling a puzzle together, each work on your own puzzle (it could be the same image) in the same room, or do it over a video chat app. If you each do the same puzzle, it's kind of fun to compare how each one of you approaches the puzzle! Psst! If you do a Cobble Hill puzzle, please take work in progress photos and share it with us in our Facebook puzzle group, Quirky Together! 

4. Time yourself! Puzzles for a lot of people are enjoyed as a relaxing activity and we think that's lovely. But you may have fun challenging yourself to complete a puzzle as fast as you can. Get out that timer and the minute you hit the start button, start opening that box and see how long it takes to complete it! Good luck!

5. Think outside the box. Alright, we may not want to admit it, but puzzles don't just come in boxes. The reality is, National Puzzle Day isn't just about jigsaw puzzles, or even ones specifically from Cobble Hill, but it also includes sudoku, crossword puzzles, word searches, brain teasers, online puzzles, any activity that requires cognitive function, memory and problem solving skills. You can find so many free activities online or maybe you can head to the local bookstore to buy an activity book that interests you. (Hint: keep reading until you get to #8, we may have a suggestion for you). 

6. Bust out a puzzle. That's obvious, right? Stop putting off your puzzling and crack open that box, rip open that bag and have some fun!

7. Shop for a puzzle. If you don't believe that takes some problem solving skills, then you haven't met a fanatical puzzler. Trust us, it's not easy to solve which puzzle to buy when you know you need to stay within a budget. So, if you don't have a puzzle in your stash, shop the www.cobblehillpuzzles.com website right now, and get free shipping today with this coupon code: JAN292023. Valid for one day only! We are reducing our stock to prepare for the transition to our new box, so we apologize that there are many favourite puzzle images out of stock at the moment. But there are a lot of great puzzles on sale at 20% off, so shop while it's available! 

8. Playable Puzzle Online. Lastly, if you have some time, visit our website's Playable Puzzle for this week called "Earth". You can find the link under the Contact Us menu. Earth is one of the four puzzles in the Elements series by Shelley Davies. This series will be retired this year, so if you like the puzzle, be sure to pick it up while it lasts - it's a great puzzle to enjoy now or save it for Earth Day on April 22nd. But for right now, you can play a 150 piece version online and take it for a test spin. There's even a timer - so you can implement National Puzzle Day idea #4! Look at you go! 

Have a great National Puzzle Day!

Reflecting on Adventures, Inspired by Nature's Mirror

 by guest blogger, Elmer Prather

My most recent puzzle is a 1000-piece titled Nature’s Mirror by Travis Melin. Before I spend time putting a puzzle together, I must have a connection to it. My connection to this puzzle is the lake. The lake in the puzzle picture reminded me of my favorite fishing lake, Clearwater Lake located just outside of the Pas, Manitoba, Canada. Clearwater Lake is one of the few “true blue” lakes in the world, being the clearest lake in Canada and the second clearest in the world. It is a glacier formed lake and is renowned for its large lake trout.

Nature's Mirror 1000pc puzzle assembled and photographed by Elmer Prather

Clearwater Lake is two thousand miles from my home in Georgia. I have had the pleasure of fishing in this lake on three separate occasions. Three of my best fishing friends and I made these trips in a Volkswagen bus. Once we left Atlanta, we drove 24 hours a day stopping only for gas and bathroom breaks. I prepared sandwiches and other food items for our meals while one of my friends was driving us along. We camped in a campground on the lake where we could walk from our campsite to the lake to fish, but we usually just drove a short distance and fished off the jetties.

Clearwater Lake measures eight miles in one direction and twelve miles in the other direction making it an oval shape. In the mornings, the lake would be very calm and around 10:00am it would have whitecaps. We towed a 12-foot Sears runabout boat with a 9.4-horsepower engine on the first trip and rented a boat from a local marina the other two times.

Besides my love of fishing and putting puzzles together, I am also into photography. Every photo tells a story. When I see the picture of the puzzle, I am putting together I try to imagine the story the artist was trying to tell when the photo was taken. The picture in this puzzle displays a pristine lake with a few stratus clouds meandering across the blue sky overhead. In the background there is a lush green forest reflecting onto the lake. With the reflection glistening off the surface of the lake the title of the puzzle, Nature’s Mirror, is perfect. The wooden canoe shown in the photo looks new. It appears to be a cedar strip canoe made from narrow strips of cedar glued together. The rocks laying on the lake shore and under the canoe reminded me of the rocks that were used to construct the jetty from which we fished at Clearwater Lake.

After a little checking, the lake pictured in the puzzle is Bearskin Lake in East Cook, MN. It's 493 acres with an average depth of 31 feet and a max depth of 78 feet. I would like to someday fish in this lake.

During our fishing trips to Clearwater Lake, we caught quite a few lake trout. We took our cooking utensils with us on these trips and used them to cook some of the fish we caught. To prepare for our evening meals, we would fry some of the lake trout we had caught that day and hushpuppies we made from a mix we purchased in Atlanta. On these three fishing trips, we all felt that we were ‘living the life.”

Elmer Prather
Canton, Georgia
U S A

Nature's Mirror 1000pc puzzle by Travis Melin

Special Catch! Nature's Mirror will be transitioning to the new downsized box! If you want it in the current 10" x 14" box, then you can catch it on sale now before it's gone!

Click to buy in USA.

Click to buy in Canada.