On July 8th SpeedPuzzling.com hosted the Minnesota Speed Puzzling Championship! Puzzlers from around the state and surrounding areas came to St. Paul to see who the top puzzler would be!
If you aren’t familiar with speed puzzling contests, they are competitions where people race to complete a puzzle faster than everyone else. Typically people compete in teams of four, but there are also pairs and individual divisions. Each competitor gets their own copy of the same puzzle, the officiant counts down, and then the race is on!
The puzzle image is usually kept a secret from competitors before the competition, so they are seeing it for the first time when they start the timer.
Many times there are prizes offered, and this time it was a big one! The first place individual, pair, and team won a free entry into the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association’s Speed Puzzling Nationals coming up in March 2024. The top three winners in each division also received puzzles as prizes so they could continue to practice when they got home.
First up was the individuals division. Puzzlers were in for a treat as the puzzle was a never-before-seen Ravensburger puzzle made specifically for the contest! Puzzlers raced to finish “Road to Oz”, a 500-piece puzzle featuring all our favorite Wizard of Oz characters as well as the flying monkeys.
This tricky image included a difficult all yellow brick road section along with the Wicked Witch’s hand being the same color as the trees! In the end, Lauren K. came out on top with a speedy time of 44 minutes and 46 seconds.
The next puzzle was a farm scene from MasterPieces. 550 piece “Stone Mill Vineyards” depicts a country estate with an antique store, vineyard, and beautiful flower garden. With so many details in the puzzle, the duos had to work overtime to distinguish which part of the image each piece went to.
Many pairs found themselves struggling with the stairs and cobblestone path as the colors were so similar. Winners Lauren K. and Sarah S. finished with a time of 29 minutes and 48 seconds.
Finally, teams of four worked to finish “Postcards from Lake Country”, a fitting image for the Minnesota contest! This Cobble Hill 1000-piece puzzle had 9 distinct sections with nature scenes full of flora and fauna.
Many teams went to work on the colored edges of the postcards as it was the easiest way to create a framework to piece together the wilderness scenes in. Coming in first place was the team made up of Andrea K, Dawne R, Lauren K, and Sarah S.
We had a blast helping to sponsor this event, and are looking forward to the Northeast Regional Championship in Connecticut in August. For full results, head to SpeedPuzzling.com or click here. You can get your own team together and see how you compare to the teams in Minnesota!
If you’ve done a puzzle contest before, or would like to try it out after reading this, let us know in the comments.