Andrew and I have a soft spot for odd competitions (if you do too, check out We Are The Champions on Netflix). For instance, we are not immune to the charms of spelling bees, which I participated in both as a kid in 5th grade, and as an adult in a San Francisco performance of the The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Several years ago we came across speed puzzling on YouTube. We watched several installments of The World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship, held annually in Spain, and Karen Puzzles quickly became our favorite quirky hostess into this whole new world. We were hooked.

One fine day in May while in the Guimarães mall, Andrew noticed a list of cultural events being held at our local Fnac. For those who are not familiar, Fnac is an awesome store that is a hybrid of Best Buy and Barnes and Noble. They have books, electronics, music, board games, puzzles, and a ton of other stuff. If you are a hobbyist, you will be able to find something super fun in this store. In addition to board gaming sessions which are right up our alley (we will discuss this exciting topic in a future blog post), he noticed a Ravensburger speed puzzling tournament. Unfortunately when he asked about the registration requirements, all tournament spots had already been filled.

We have been casual puzzlers since childhood and enjoy puzzling together which we have done every now and then post retirement. Although we had watched several hours of speed puzzling, were we ready to jump into puzzling at a competitive level? We hadn’t ever tried doing puzzles fast, how does one even start training? Since the tournament was full, we didn’t really give it any more thought until June rolled around and we noticed another competition on the schedule at Fnac.

This time it was a Clementoni tournament, and we registered on time, but we only had one week to prepare before the competition. We realized a bit late that maybe we should have started practicing in May, so we dug out our remaining puzzles from one of the boxes in the garage and got to work. One thing to note is we gave away several puzzles that we had completed in Olhão before moving, since puzzling is a popular hobby amongst expats in the South, so we didn’t have many to work with.

Our first fast attempt was a 500 piece circular Votes for Women puzzle (I think I received this as a gift from someone) that had a lot of distinctive colors and patterns. We did it in 1 hour 14 minutes and 16 seconds. Oh my gosh, maybe we were going to be really great at this! Next we tackled a 750 piece based on old covers from The Saturday Evening Post (I think we got this one from Grandma Finazzo), it had irregular pieces and was much more of a challenge. We finished it in 3 hours 57 minutes and 7 seconds, ugh this going fast thing may be harder than we expected.

The only other big puzzle we had was a 1000 piece monster that Andrew had owned since the mid 90’s. It is a photomosaic world map with a ton of blue pieces and minuscule pictures on every piece. We worked on it for multiple days and all in all it took us 18 hours 39 minutes and 14 seconds. We were exhausted and definitely weren’t setting any records. I was shocked at how mentally draining puzzling fast was.

We practiced on both our big dining room table and a small card table because in competitions you have limited space to work. We practiced shape sorting and color sorting pieces. Sometimes we used foam boards, but we got confused about how to work in an organized fashion so we watched more YouTube videos for inspiration. We didn’t feel experienced enough to quickly and easily identify the best strategy for tackling a new puzzle with speed. We tried to communicate without bickering when things got tense and I got frustrated. We signed up for My Speed Puzzling so we could keep track of our times and see how fast other people were completing puzzles that we worked on. We were really slow, but we weren’t always the slowest.

Since we weren’t familiar with the Italian Clementoni puzzle brand, we made a trip back to Fnac to purchase some more practice puzzles. We tried to make smart choices that contained elements we needed to work on. We purchased a 500 piece Clementoni kitten puzzle so we could practice fur, a 500 piece Janod that had a lot of one color, and a 500 piece round Ravensburger that was a fruit and vegetable color block puzzle. We did puzzles every day. We did small 80 piece and 100 piece puzzles. We puzzled together and separately. We tried to keep our stamina up the whole time, but noticed that it was easy to fall back into a casual puzzling pace after an initial flurry at the start.

Andrew got worried that we might have to complete a 1000 piece puzzle since it was a pairs competition, so he made another trip to Fnac to round out our practice collection. Although the competition was free to enter, Fnac sure was getting a lot of business from us in the days leading up to the race. I staunchly defended the stance that we would be working on a 500 piece puzzle because I was petrified of doing a 1000 piece in our first competition. We would definitely run out of time and be thrown into the “did not finish” category.

Competition day arrived on Sunday, the 22nd of June. I hadn’t slept well, how could I be so nervous about this? I hoped to be at one tiny table in the corner of a room full of puzzlers, I wanted to blend in and not be the center of attention in our first attempt at this. We arrived at Fnac after a 35 minute walk from home and I was utterly shocked to see only 2 tables. This was going to be a head to head battle and we were likely going to face a pair that was really good at puzzles. When the other pair arrived and set out their personal puzzle timer, we knew it was probably over for us. Did this mean we would automatically win 2nd place? Would the other team get to collect both the 1st and 2nd place prizes if we didn’t finish? Would we still be working on this puzzle until the mall closed?

Thankfully the puzzle was a 500 piece, but it was a tricky landscape with a lot of snow. We weren’t sure how it would go, but we vowed to do our best. We started fast, and did a pretty good job of sorting about 2/3 of our pieces. There were some tricky darker pieces and rather than wasting a bunch of time trying to figure out what to do, we left them in a pile to resolve later. After 20-30 minutes we were keeping pretty good pace with the other team, but they quickly pulled ahead and finished at 54 minutes and 53 seconds. Our final time was 1 hour 27 minutes and 58 seconds. We had done a challenging brand new puzzle in under 90 minutes, which was a real win for us. We actually finished and Fnac hadn’t kicked us out. Even though we weren’t even close to winning, the other team was impressed with our time when they realized that this was our very first competition (they had been traveling to a bunch of different regional Fnacs to participate in competitions). We got to keep the 500 piece competition puzzle, and also received a 1000 piece for 2nd place, I couldn’t believe there wasn’t an entry fee to participate.

Where do we go from here? Well, we aren’t ready to head to Valladolid, Spain for World competitions just yet, but I think we will keep practicing. Doing puzzles fast brings an intensity that reminds us of the part of 911 dispatching that we really loved. I don’t want to do puzzles everyday, but I would like to keep going fast and improving our teamwork. Our next goal is to complete a 500 piece puzzle in less than an hour – we already have the Votes for Women puzzle down to 1 hour 4 minutes and 17 seconds on our 2nd attempt. Maybe we will find or start an exchange program so we can keep practicing a wide span of puzzles without accumulating too many (our board game collection already takes up quite a lot of space). I have a feeling that we will compete again, although 2nd place in our first competition will be extremely difficult to beat!