2025-10-21
Today was my very first experience speed puzzling with other people, and although I quickly regretted my choice of puzzle, I had a great time and learned a lot. The Canadian Speed Puzzlers group organises occasional “BYOP” evenings or “Bring Your Own Puzzle”. As the name suggests, everyone brings their own puzzle to complete, and although some may end up with the same image, we’re each competing against our own time and it’s a very low-stress environment. The theme for this event was a food-related puzzle or anything from the Cobble Hill brand. Until about a week before the event I didn’t have a puzzle that would match the theme, so I hopped on the Puzzles Canada website to find something suitable. I settled on a fun graphic image of coffee - not really the food I had in mind, but close enough. I wasn’t familiar with the brand but figured any 500-piece puzzle would do. I mean really, how different can they be?
Turns out, they can be very different indeed. The first thing I noticed after dumping all the pieces onto my table was how big they are compared to my usual pieces. A standard Ravensburger 500 piece puzzle (which is by far the type I’ve been practicing the most) has a finished dimension of about 49 by 36cm (or a bit more than 19 by 14 inches). The finished dimensions of this Galison puzzle were 50.8cm (20 inches) squared. That’s roughly a 45% increase in size and I definitely noticed every millimetre of difference while flipping and sorting the pieces. Normally I can hold on to quite a few edge pieces while flipping everything over, but this time they kept falling out of my hands. The pieces are also substantially thinner than what I’m used to, and compared with the difference in size it made for an overall puzzling experience (pun intended).
The image itself wasn’t extremely difficult, but the event was at 7pm and I’ve been doing all my speed practices in the morning or early afternoon and wasn’t used to working with artificial light. I also wasn’t used to being on camera and was very self-conscious of whatever my face was doing as I struggled to sort my thoughts and the pieces. Still, my biggest mistake, and my biggest challenge, was that I completely failed to keep my cool. For such a low-stakes event, I managed to put a tremendous amount of pressure on myself and was trying to do everything 10 times faster than usual. As a consequence, I kept dropping pieces on the floor (3 times to be exact) and changed my mind several times about how to sort the pieces and which part of the image I should start with. Although I wasn’t very happy with my final time, I’m still very grateful for the experience. I’m signed up for the next BYOP and will try to attend as many as I can. If I want to participate in actual competitions someday (and I really really do), I’m going to have to get used to different conditions and potentially being on screen.
A few days after the BYOP, I tried this puzzle again just to convince myself that I could do a better job when I wasn’t stressing myself out so much. Both times are included below and I think they speak for themselves.
Puzzle Stats
Brand: Galison
Name: Coffeeology
Artist: Marisol Ortega
Time to completion (1st try): 94 minutes
Time to completion (2nd try): 69 minutes
