Looking for clues to what makes puzzles so alluring
Perhaps it’s fitting that the new book by A.J. Jacobs is missing a piece. For “The Puzzler,” he’s diligently explored the world of Rubik’s Cubes, crosswords and Sudokus. He’s logged hours in the air, recruiting his family to represent the United States in Spain at the world jigsaw championship. (Team Jacobs came in second to last.) He’s constructed and competed in scavenger hunts and talked chess with Garry Kasparov. Yet his sprightly, far-reaching book was completed too late to make much room for Wordle, the puzzle phenomenon that went viral in late 2021. Nothing has helped us find our COVID-era Zen, it seems, quite like spending a few minutes every day looking for a secret five-letter word.
Even without Wordle, there’s room for a book like this from Jacobs, who specializes in stunt titles like 2004’s
“The Know-It-All” (for which he read an encyclopedia) or 2012’s “Drop Dead Healthy” (about his pursuit of optimal fitness). The fans of games like Wordle — for which the New York Times paid a reported seven figures in January — are clearly seeking something. But what? I’m not sure myself, and I’ve long been among the seekers. I complete at least four crosswords daily, plus Spelling Bee and Wordle (and occasionally its mean cousins Quordle and Octordle). Finishing a Saturday crossword in under 10 minutes gives me a ridiculously deep sense of pleasure; my ongoing haplessness at cryptics wounds my ego. “The Puzzler” recognizes and celebrates the frustration and obsession.
But explaining that obsession is a little tougher, and though Jacobs doesn’t avoid trying, he’s mostly here to have fun. He’s mastered an avuncular, jokey, at times corny tone: Heading to Spain for the jigsaw contest, he quips that “speed-solving jigsaws sounded weird and paradoxical, like a yoga tournament or a napping derby.” And his choices in topics often spotlight the more peculiar examples in the puzzle world: the person who can finish a Rubik’s Cube in a second using his feet, the owner of a heart-crushingly difficult Vermont corn maze, and puzzlers like Jim Sanborn, the creator of Kryptos, a 1990 sculpture in a courtyard at
CIA headquarters. It contains a code that’s yet to be completely cracked. When Jacobs tells a Kryptos message board he’s visiting the sculpture, the solvers have absurdly picayune requests. “Look for oddcolored patches of grass,” one suggests.
The puzzle-world pros that Jacobs interviews have a few ideas about their fixations. Sometimes it’s a craving for simplicity: “Life is a puzzle,” crossword constructor Peter Gordon tells him. “With crosswords, there is one correct answer.” Sometimes it’s escape: One competitive jigsaw-er says, “I prefer solving jigsaw puzzles to solving people puzzles. The pieces don’t talk back.” Sometimes it’s self-improvement: “There is so much faulty thinking, and puzzles can help us think better,” says math and logicpuzzle pro Tanya Khovanova.
Jacobs is particularly enchanted with that puzzling-asself-improvement theme. “Puzzles can make us better people,” he asserts early on. Later, he argues that thinking about things in puzzlelike ways can encourage a problem-solving mind-set. “If I hear about the climate crisis, I want to curl up in a fetal position in the corner,” he writes. “But if I’m asked about the climate puzzle, I want to try to solve it. That, to me, is the only way out of our current mess.”
But that’s just semantics. If it were that simple, the ice caps wouldn’t be melting. Solutions to various global conflicts are no closer for my reaching Genius at Spelling Bee. Our biggest challenges demand consensus-building; puzzling, generally done alone, seems like the opposite of what’s required. The most persuasive explanation of puzzles’ appeal comes from Sudoku inventor Maki Kaji, who’s devised an elegant visualization to explain the number game’s experience. As with Sudokus, so with life: a challenge, plus mental effort applied to it, that results in some feeling of surprise or satisfaction. In all things, we’re forever hunting that exclamation point.
The book itself offers plenty of opportunities to do that chasing. It’s lavishly illustrated with vintage puzzles: the very first sudoku (published in 1979 under the homely name “Number Place”), a Soviet-era visual puzzle, a maze created by “Alice in Wonderland” author Lewis Carroll, a 1969 chess puzzle by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s also larded with a new batch of puzzles, created by Greg Pliska, that generally reside in the sweet spot of entertaining and frustrating that all good puzzles require. (As Jacobs notes when writing about scavenger hunts, “The real goal is NOT to stump the solvers.”) And the book contains a secret puzzle whose first solver will win $10,000.
That purse will no doubt improve the life of whoever wins it. But “The Puzzler” mainly shows that we make too much of puzzles as vehicles for our betterment. At heart, they just expose our funny, brilliant, quirky humanness. We love riddles, Jacobs writes, because they show how we’re “rationalization machines. We are great at finding patterns where none exist.” And if we don’t find the pattern? That’s our humanness, too. “There’s no such thing as failure,” a chess-book author tells Jacobs. “Just try to fail and fail and fail.” Mission accomplished, every day, millions of times over.