As you can tell, we like games over here. And my husband and I especially like puzzles. I’m not sure what it is about them – maybe the fact that it is something to sit and do together while we talk and we can work on it for a several days. Unless my husband decides he HAS to finish it and stays up late to do so…it’s happened a few times. 

But today we aren’t talking about those days of leisurely putting a puzzle together. We are talking about Puzzle Races. 

We were introduced to this activity by a friend of ours who has a family that loves games even more than ours. The idea is to have multiple competitions putting puzzles together until someone comes out on top.

You’ll use a bracket style competition. To keep it simple we recommend starting with either 4 people or 4 couples with 4 of the same (or very similar) puzzle. Two people (or couples) compete against one another, and the winners then compete against each other. That means you’ll need a total of 6 puzzles – 4 of one kind and 2 of another. It’s fun to make the second round puzzle a bit more challenging. 

If you have a larger group and want to include even more people, you can have two different brackets (starting with 4 puzzles, then 2 to determine the winner) and the winners of each bracket then compete for one final round. Talk about serious puzzle champ! Make sure to get the same or similar level puzzles to keep everything fair. You could also do it where every couple competes against every couple, and the couple with the most wins is then the champ! Or if there are two couples tied, they then compete for the final round. As you can see, there are various ways you can do these puzzles races!

Since you don’t want the puzzles to take forever to complete, try using children’s puzzles. Any of these puzzles would work great: found here, here, here and here. You could also check your local dollar store – they usually have a good selection of children’s puzzles! 

Trisha

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