Puzzle Day

What the day is

National Puzzle Day is observed on January 29. It takes in the whole category: jigsaws, crosswords, sudoku, cryptics, logic grids, mechanical puzzles and the rest.

Late January is a sensible home for it. It is the dead middle of winter in the northern hemisphere, when an evening at a table with a jigsaw is a more attractive proposition than it is in July.

Origin and background

The observance is commonly credited to a puzzle enthusiast who established it in the mid-1990s, though the documentation is thin and no organization formally sponsors it.

The individual forms have much clearer histories. The jigsaw began as a teaching tool: in the 1760s a London mapmaker mounted maps on wood and cut them into pieces so children could reassemble them and learn geography. Cardboard and die-cutting made them cheap in the twentieth century, and they boomed during the Great Depression, when a puzzle was a reusable evening's entertainment for very little money.

The crossword is precisely dated. The first recognizable one appeared in a New York newspaper in December 1913, and within a decade it was a national craze. Cryptic crosswords developed separately in Britain, with their own conventions of wordplay that make them nearly a different pastime.

Sudoku arrived from a different direction: an American puzzle called Number Place in the late 1970s, picked up and popularized in Japan, then exported back to the English-speaking world in the 2000s, where it became ubiquitous within about two years.

How to take part

• Do a jigsaw with someone. It is one of the few activities that works with conversation running alongside it.
• Sort by edge and color first. Everyone knows this and most people still start by hunting randomly.
• Try a cryptic if you only do quick crosswords. The first few are impenetrable and then the conventions click.
• Finish something you abandoned. Most households have a partly done puzzle in a cupboard.
• Pass puzzles on. Charity shops take completed jigsaws, and libraries increasingly lend them.