For lots of information and some great images from this incredible company, click here to go to the Stave website.
Stave Puzzle Designs Hit the Mass Market
2004
Stave Puzzles (http://www.stave.com/) is perhaps the most prestigious jigsaw puzzle company in the country. Their hand-cut wooden puzzles are not only beautiful and entertaining, they’re devilishly difficult. The trick puzzles are not always rectangular—some pieces fit inside and outside a puzzle with a non-solid image; pieces may fit in more than one place, or they may not fit anywhere (once in a while a piece is thrown in that’s not from the puzzle). Some pieces, called “figurals” are shaped as animals or objects. A quick look through the web site shows puzzles ranging from $396 to over $3400, with many at a special web price of $1024—for example, a “traditional” 200-piece puzzle cut from a 12” x 8” print by artist Sonia Menna Barreto, entitled “Game.”
Now you can buy an original Stave design puzzle for $12 (!) on the web, through the Great American Puzzle Factory (www.greatamericanpuzzle.com) [now owned by Fundex] . The 100- to 110-piece puzzles are cardboard, but have the same Stave trickery you’ll find in the expensive wood puzzles. FISHBOWL FRENZY, for example, has pieces that will fit in two different places, so you’ll be moving sections of the puzzle around until you find the correct solution. The fishbowl has two cats that fit into the bowl—and once you get that, you reassemble the puzzle to get the fish inside the bowl and the cats outside. An even more difficult puzzle is the SEAHORSE SHANTY, rated as “You’ll need an antacid for the brain on this one.” After you assemble the shack, you need to piece together the ocean below as well as the seahorses; they fit together in different ways, but there is only one way in which the seahorses actually will fit in the open spaces inside the ocean.
This is the ideal matching of incredible art and puzzle design with affordable mass-market manufacturing. A stave puzzle for $12?! This is too easy—I can do all my gift shopping on one website. This press scoop is not a paid promotional product endorsement—this is The Big Game Hunter giving his Best of 2004 award to the Great American Puzzle Factory and Stave Puzzles for combining their respective talents to create the perfect-puzzle perfect-price product.
