The Puzzle Table Is Open

Puzzles are a funny thing to sell. You hand someone a box of cardboard, and what they actually take home is a week of slow evenings, a kitchen table nobody can eat at and a very good reason to sit still. We love that!

So we went a little overboard. The Puzzle Table, a small puzzle shop inside the Moss & Fog Shop, opens today. We picked every box the way we pick art prints: would we hang it when it’s done? That rule got us Frank Lloyd Wright in gold foil, Yayoi Kusama’s whole life in polka dots, a Warhol box that moves and one cabinet of curiosities that glows when you turn the lights off.

Warm up with this one first. It’s ours, and it only has fifteen pieces.

There's a little sliding puzzle waiting for you in this story, and it only works on the site. Slide it back together here.

The puzzles with a trick up their sleeve

A plain 1000 piece puzzle is lovely. A puzzle that does something is better, and this winter a lot of them do.

The Occult and Curious puzzle is a midnight blue cabinet of palmistry hands, moths, skulls, crystals and a snake. Finish it, switch off the lamp, and parts of it glow green right up off the table. The Andy Warhol Soup Cans box has a lenticular lid, so the cans flip from one colorway to the next as you tilt it, the way Warhol printed them over and over in different inks. At 300 pieces it's an evening, not a winter.

Gray Malin's Italy puzzle is printed on both sides: orange umbrellas below a hillside town on the front, blue and white umbrellas on a rocky cove on the back. And Frank Lloyd Wright's Saguaro Forms comes as a 750 piece shaped puzzle, which means the finished piece follows the outline of the artwork. No straight edges to start from. Brave people only.

Frank Lloyd Wright, in pieces

Wright drew the way he built, all circles, squares and stacked color, and it turns out that makes for wonderful puzzles. City by the Sea started as a mural he designed in 1913 for Midway Gardens in Chicago, the city skyline at night as if seen from an apartment window. It never went up there. Wright finally hung it at Taliesin West in 1956, where you can still see it.

Saguaro Forms and Cactus Flowers has an even better story. He drew it in 1927 as one of twelve covers for Liberty magazine, and the editors decided all twelve were too avant garde to run. Almost a hundred years later it's on a 1000 piece gold foil puzzle, which feels like a small win for Frank.

Round it out with the Imperial Hotel sliding wood puzzle, sixteen wooden tiles with his Tokyo floor plate design on one side and the old Game of Fifteen on the other, plus a two deck playing card set and a couple of first books for the smallest architect in the house. If you're deep in Wright already, our illustrated map of his houses in nearly every state and the story of Fallingwater's restoration are good company.

For people who'd rather be outside

Some of the best ones are basically field guides. Foraged is a photograph by Sherrie Sanville, who goes by Shroom Mama and walks her 150 acres in Michigan collecting mushrooms, moss and lichen, then lays them out like a naturalist's tray. World of Mushrooms is its illustrated cousin, fly agarics and chanterelles scattered across a dark forest floor. Do them back to back and you'll know a few more mushrooms by spring.

Avian Friends is twenty bird portraits by Gennine D. Zlatkis set out like specimen cards, which makes it one of the friendliest 1000 piece puzzles we've seen, since every bird is its own color. The box even carries a short poem by Jennifer Bartlett.

Art you finish yourself

Illustrator Laura Callaghan drew The World of Yayoi Kusama in fine, crowded detail, from her 1960s New York years to her long life in Tokyo, pumpkins and polka dots everywhere. It's a lovely way to spend time with her work after we lost her this summer. Sensing Colors by Jessica Poundstone is the opposite: no figures at all, just glowing bands of color that borrow the look of hyperspectral imaging. Sorting by shade is half the fun, and the other half is properly hard.

How long will it take?

• 300 pieces: one good evening.
• 500 pieces: a slow weekend.
• 750 shaped: longer than you think, because there are no edges.
• 1000 pieces: a week of evenings, or one snow day.

Most of the 1000 piece puzzles here finish at 20 by 27 inches, so clear a card table, not a coffee table. And if a finished puzzle ever feels like the end of the story, Tim Klein would disagree: he mashes pieces from different puzzles together into some very strange pictures.

The whole collection, plus dominoes, card games and the National Parks puzzle, is on the Puzzle Table. Every order can come with a free handwritten card from us, and our holiday gift guide has more ideas if puzzles aren't their thing. Go have a look!

The Moss & Fog Shop is our own shop, packed by hand in Portland.

By Moss & Fog Staff