Brain Teasers

These complicated puzzles promise to frustrate and infuriate but are guaranteed to make you feel like a genius – once you solve them!

- Adeline Wong

Sadism is not a word you would associate with puzzles but for Stave Puzzles, inflicting suffering is the very basis of its appeal. And we mean that in the most positive sense – after all, consider how its customer list is littered with names of corporate bigwigs heading Fortune 500 companies. It must be doing something pretty unique for esteemed names such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and even Queen Elizabeth II to be ardent fans.

Stave, located in Norwich, Vermont, is one of a few companies that still produces wooden jigsaw puzzles; each cherry-backed piece is cut by hand. And, since its start in 1974, it has been devising puzzles with devious tricks at varying levels of difficulty.

Consider the Olivia octopus puzzle. With pieces that fit in more than one place, there are 10,000 ways to assemble it – of which only one is correct. Throughout its stable of works, Stave mischievously weaves in challenges such as the absence of straight-edged pieces or embedding them into the body of a puzzle to mislead a fan. It also creates pieces that are similar in shape and colour to confuse, and even makes puzzles that fit snugly at the borders – but with voids in the interior to befuddle.