Zen Out with This Acrylic Puzzle Designed by Architects

Jigsaw puzzles have been around for centuries and are always solved the same way.  By squinting at the picture on the cardboard box for a few days until everything finally falls into place.  But what if a puzzle fit together more like a house?

Leave it to two architects to create a puzzle inspired by geometric patterns that doesn’t have a picture at all.

The Waves Puzzle by Moda is a whole new spin on the traditional jigsaw puzzle.  Instead of focusing on completing the image piece-by-piece based on a picture, the Waves Puzzle requires you to identify piece shapes and patterns.  The aim is to let your mind take a backseat as your hands seek out the curves and joints of the smooth acrylic and find the position of each piece.

Waves Puzzle Reviewed

The folks at Moda were kind enough to send us a puzzle to review, and being brain teaser fiends, we were eager to dive in.

The first step of starting a traditional jigsaw puzzle is by far the most tedious… flipping all the pieces over.  The perk of the Waves Puzzle (and what keeps it so zen-like) is the lack of a picture allows you to pretty much just dump the pieces out and get started.  

Unlike a standard puzzle where everyone starts hogging corner and edge pieces, the puzzle from Moda starts from the center with a solid square piece.  It doesn’t take long before you get a sense of the pattern in the pieces.  They’re symmetrical and flow like a wave from the center square out, the shape of each row becoming more pronounced.

The hard acrylic keeps you from jamming any pieces where they don’t fit, and the light “click” as they snap together is very satisfying.  Mistakes can happen, but the puzzle is small enough that pieces are easy enough to rearrange once you find out where you went wrong.

One last click, and done!  It took us about 30min from start to finish, but you could definitely get faster the more you worked with the waves pattern.  Unlike a 1000 piece jigsaw, the first thing we did was tear it apart and start trying new techniques – working from the edges in or making a cross from the center out.

The process felt more like solving a Rubik’s Cube or other brain teasers than a jigsaw puzzle.

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You can order your own Waves Puzzle in your choice of blue, grey, yellow or iridescent for a $35 pledge at Moda’s Kickstarter Page.