The weird world of Crossword Puzzle Jigsaw Puzzles

jigsaw puzzles have been around since 1762 and crossword puzzles have been around since 1913 so it only makes sense that at some point somebody would think to combine them [Music] and so today I'm going to be diving into the weird world of crossword jigsaw puzzle hybrids there have been a lot more than you think I personally have five of them also it's almost Mother's Day and my mom is incredible at crossword puzzles I swear she knows every single word in the English language I personally do the Monday Tuesday and Wednesday New York Times crossword and then it gets a little too hard for me so okay I don't know exactly how many of these I'm gonna solve in this video we're going to take it one at a time and just see how it goes but make sure you stay tuned until the end because I did a lot of research into other crossword jigsaw puzzles that I don't have and there are some really wacky and interesting ones in there so I'll talk about those at the end but right now I'm going to do a puzzle that is way earlier than the puzzles I usually feature on here this is from the 1930s okay so this is a cross jig puzzle it is three in one it is two jig puzzles and a crossword puzzle interesting how her language has changed now we'd call that a jigsaw puzzle and crossword wouldn't have the hyphen in it apparently it only cost 25 cents it's only about 300 pieces so it's not going to take that long to put together if we look at the sides of the Box um you can see all of the information about where the this came from I guess there's not really that much information on here but it was printed in the USA and this one is called Nocturne and speaking of Nocturne look what else I have that I bought on eBay ages ago check that out it's the exact same puzzle this is like an ad for this exact puzzle so I would assume that these boats is what we're going to be putting together on one side of the puzzle there's no more information on the bottom of the box so I'll put that aside so you can see that these pieces are like random cut and on one side is going to be a picture probably those boats and then on the back we have some kind of crosswords puzzle oh here we go on the back of these we have some kind of drawing I don't know how that interacts with the crossword puzzle I also um don't see any clues I just see letters filled in to a crossword puzzle so was this supposed to come with like a printed out sheet of clues or like a printed crossword puzzle of some kind uh I don't know so I'm gonna solve this puzzle in just a minute but first I want to tell you how you can make your own Mother's Day crossword jigsaw with the sponsor of today's video puzzle you [Music] so I was really thinking about a creative way that you could use puzzle use a custom puzzle service for Mother's Day I got this one made with photos of me and my mom and I'm gonna be sending it home to her so that's all well and good but if your mom is like my mom and likes crossword puzzles you could get a crossword puzzle printed onto a jigsaw puzzle and it just so happens that I made a crossword puzzle that you're welcome to use I actually designed this crossword puzzle for Mother's Day a couple years ago and just now I went ahead and added some extra Design Elements to make it more fun to do as a jigsaw puzzle to use it you can download the image that I'm going to link right down below and then you just upload it to puzzle use custom puzzle tool as if it was a photo I got it printed as a 500 piece puzzle which I think is a good difficulty for this one but wait another cool thing that puzzle you offers is that you can actually get it printed without the picture on the front of the box so your mom is gonna have no idea what picture she's putting together and it'll be such a fun surprise as she sees the crossword puzzle come together and then without the picture on the box um once she has finished the jigsaw puzzle this isn't particularly rare or vintage or valuable so you can go ahead and just solve it right on the puzzle I'm giving you permission I'm not gonna get mad at you so puzzle U is super fast they will deliver your order in a week or less so if you want to get one you can use my code Karen May 23 for 23 off your order and that is valid in a bunch of different countries so all right now let's get back to our 1930s puzzle [Music] thank you [Music] oh wow look at these pea shapes that's beautiful [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh my God this has been a much bigger undertaking than I thought I now see how these puzzles would have entertained people in the 30s before there was like Netflix so it's been like an hour and this is as far as I've gotten there are a couple things happening here first I am so happy that I bought this because if I did not have a picture to work on I guarantee you I would have given up by now second I am definitely missing a lot of pieces like there's this whole chunk up here that is just not in this puzzle and since it's a random cut and the pieces don't lock together um that just makes it even harder also since the pieces don't lock together I should have done it on a felt board because these just keep sliding around so it's so hard to see the actual shape that I'm trying to make so originally I was gonna just do this and then take it apart and then do it again but from the back but guys I don't think I can do that I think once I'm done I'm just gonna flip it over I'm gonna cheat I'm just gonna flip [Music] foreign [Music] Okay so they didn't quite go according to plan look at how many pieces are missing this is crazy if it was just like one or two I'd be like fine it's been around since the 30s but like this is so wild but okay this is the part that I have been the most excited about like this is the whole point of this video we're gonna find out what the cross part of the Cross jig puzzle looks like so I'm just gonna flip the whole thing over onto my felt board this time so the pieces don't keep moving around foreign okay I like how it looks like there's going to be either a gradient or some kind of color difference between the top and the bottom that would have definitely made it a lot easier but now these are the only parts that locked together so from here I'm literally gonna have to move these one piece at a time is my life [Music] okay so as I started flipping this over I was like I wonder if this would have been easier if I had just done it from this side from the start because we have this gradient we have these bars on the side but then I look at just how many pieces have their backs entirely ripped off so it would have been like there was another what like 15 missing pieces I actually want to know in the comments if you were doing a vintage puzzle like this and you started to realize just how many and missing pieces there were would you have finished it okay so it looks like I really did just get burned on this puzzle because one quick Google search later and yes it is supposed to come with a printed crossword and these aren't even that rare or expensive there are copies on eBay right now selling for four to twenty five dollars it's just one of the risks of buying vintage puzzles we saw it happen last year with the Haley's Comet uh puzzle you know sometimes it doesn't turn out the way you hoped it's a lot of pieces to keep track of for the last Almost hundred years so let me just take you through a couple photos to show you what this puzzle could have been so for this specific puzzle number 16 I could only find a low quality photos of the completed puzzle so instead let's look at number 18 called Fine feathers which seems to be the most common one sold online the picture on the front is just of two parrots but then this is what we were missing look at these beautiful instructions I love the typography the layout and if you read it sure enough you're supposed to solve the picture first then you can take it apart and solve the printed crossword and then you can put together the back the crossword jigsaw puzzle goal as the answer key so kind of the whole point of this video is that I wanted to be able to share these crossword puzzles with you so I retyped it into a PDF you can download that right down below and try it out for yourself but if you are going to try it you're going to want to skip to this time code in the video because I'm about to show the answer key okay everyone good no one else is still planning to do it so here is the back of the puzzle which is the answer key again you can see how they added a gradient which would make it way easier to solve as a jigsaw puzzle and you can really see the piece cut here how they basically just cut wavy lines all the way through the center that's a little different from mine number 16 which has a lot more bumps and lumps throughout the puzzle cut also the back of mine is different with these Illustrated Black Box bars on the sides and the black squares in mine are striped rather than solid like in number 18. also I noticed that there aren't any numbers on this answer key I guess that makes it so you can't just put the numbers in order and it makes for a cleaner looking design once you have all of the letters in there so okay I found one photo of puzzle 17 online but unfortunately I couldn't find any other puzzles in this series so maybe they started at 16 and only released three of them or maybe by the end of the series they weren't as popular so these are the only ones that survived I don't know but either way I need to get another copy with a guarantee that all of the pieces are there and try it again on this channel so I can redeem the cross jig puzzle foreign that I have been so excited to do this is the crossword jigsaw game and it was released by Lawson and Lawson so the Box really doesn't give us a whole lot of clues about what we're getting into all it says is an entirely New Concept in Puzzles there's nothing on the back if we open it up uh nothing in there okay so we have a bag of pieces and then we have all of our crossword puzzle clues so you can see all the Clues here and they also tell us how long the answer is gonna be and then on the back I believe yes this is just the answer key I love that header answers stop peeking now the weird thing about these puzzle pieces and I think I mentioned this the first time I showed this puzzle in a video look at the bevel here on the side this is the front of the puzzle piece and this is the back so they printed it on the back of the puzzle and nothing is printed on the front also you can see here that we have these empty boxes in the crossword puzzle and so I'm pretty sure that instead of this being a regular crossword what you have to do is figure out the answer to each clue and then you put that number on the grid where it matches up with where that answer is on the grid so the numbers in the grid are not going to end up going in numerical order so I'm pretty sure that's how this crossword is gonna work but let's put the jigsaw puzzle together and then we can investigate further foreign [Music] oh man this puzzle is also no joke it's been almost an hour and I only just finished the Sorting I haven't actually put anything into the puzzle yet so I did finish the edge uh that went together fairly quickly and originally I was starting to lay out all of the pieces here next to the puzzle um I decided to finish the edge first just so I could see like how much space I had left on the board and then I decided to separate the pieces by letter inside the puzzle I put all of the vowels a e i o u and then you can see here everything else is organized alphabetically and since they're letters everything is already right side up so I won't have to rotate any of these pieces even for letters like oh you can see that all of the letters are towards the bottom of the boxes so I was able to tell um what direction all of these pieces were gonna go in and you can see how a lot of the pieces have little bits of letters so that one's probably an e or an f and also since everything is right side up for something like this when I know there's going to be a black bar at the top it is really quick to just scan over all the pieces and I actually already spotted that piece so that fits in right there looks great so it's definitely going to cookie but I think it's really interesting I'm feeling optimistic going into this at this point so let's do a little bit more and see how it actually goes [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you me oh man I just worked on that for two and a half hours I'm up to three hours 41 minutes and nine seconds but I've definitely made a ton of progress and it's going faster and faster now that there are way fewer pieces to look at for each spot um I'm pretty sure I am missing this piece though because that has to be an owl right for split but none of my L pieces would fit in that spot so I think I'm just missing that piece and this puzzle I think was made in uh the early 70s so there are definitely some words where I'm like is that a reference I don't know that word myothemis I'm gonna look that word up right now because I just I need to know what it means oh my God okay this puzzle has officially fried my brain it is my oh mys as if you're like my oh my what a crazy puzzle but I'm really really liking this puzzle I think it's so interesting combining um a jigsaw puzzle because there are spots where even if these weren't letters if it was just like a random pattern you could use the pattern of the grid to figure out how it goes together so it does work as a jigsaw puzzle but then also having essentially each piece be a single letter so here we can be like that could be an H that could be an o that could be a b that could be a a p like with this one coming down here I had the empa and the Y and so I was like that has to be empathy and so I looked for the T and the H and I found them super quickly what is that oh could it be boo um or moo so okay I have like a million emails that have come in that I have to reply to and I keep being like I'll do my emails later I'm working on my puzzle now but I think I'm gonna call it for the night and I'll come back in the morning and finish this up okay it's not even 9am yet but I'm so excited to get back to work on my puzzle and yes I am wearing the same shirt that I wore yesterday because it looks like a crossword puzzle and I thought that was funny [Music] thank you okay won't let her to go here mad Brad had um there are a lot of different words that could fit here here we go it's gonna be Tad guys it's Tad it's Tad and eat oh that works okay that's why this is not just a jigsaw puzzle it's a really fun word game too [Music] oh man so on this puzzle you can really only work off of what you've already put in and so I've ended up with a perfect rectangle still to go except for that one piece which is missing which I do not think is here [Music] wait what is e U what is one [Music] [Music] [Music] wait wait no no this whole time I thought this was a tea with a chunk taken out of it um or do you look at that it's my missing l so it turns out I'm not missing any pieces after all they're all here well that was a very pleasant surprise and now I feel really dumb so that took me just over four and a half hours but I loved that that was so fun [Music] [Music] okay so this is one where I really should have done my research first because when I was researching other crossword jigsaw puzzles look what I found another version of this puzzle but with instructions on the back that would have been so helpful to have when I was solving this one so the way that I thought this worked is not how this worked the clues on the sheet do go in order of the crossword puzzle we ended up putting together they just didn't put numbers on the puzzle pieces so that you couldn't just put those in order and so you wouldn't know what letter every single clue started with so apparently there are two ways that you can play this either alone or competitively to play alone you choose a clue and try to come up with the answer and then you find puzzle pieces to connect together to spell out that answer apparently you're also supposed to get stickers with all of the numbers on them and you're meant to stick those onto the boxes to keep track of which Clues you've already answered and then you just work your way through the jigsaw and the clue list simultaneously so that's the part that I missed that you're supposed to be referencing the clues as you come up with all of these answers you're not supposed to just sit here and solve it as a straight jigsaw puzzle and then the rules for playing competitively are essentially the same except that you only have three minutes to assemble each word and you get points for each letter that you get correct however I will say that you do have to be pretty good at crossword puzzles to be able to play that way like I'm looking at these Clues and most of them are really really hard like for me it was way easier to just do it as a jigsaw puzzle although I will also say I do think I might have accidentally come up with a fun puzzle idea like I do think it would be fun to do a jigsaw puzzle that gives you a bunch of answers and then you have a bunch of clues in random order and then you have to match them up it's like an easier take on a crossword puzzle anyway on to the research so I noticed a new name on this uh puzzle that I just had completely skipped over before new approaches Incorporated I also realized in doing all of my gamophiles research that with my parents's New York Times subscription I have access to their entire online archive so here's what I found from The New York Times and from searching for new approaches so they must have released this puzzle a couple different times because I found another version where the box is almost the same as mine except the design is centered and at the bottom it says new approaches instead of Lawson inside you can see the stickers as well as the instructions which would have been really great for me to have in my version the clues look exactly the same but then on the back we have this whole extra section about having missing pieces and they give the address now in terms of other products they released this six foot multi-bilingual crossword the clues come in four languages although all of the answers are in English and look at this it's like long rolls of paper that you just hang from the wall apparently they attach with velcro where people in the 70s just obsessed with giant puzzles that you could hang on the wall like remember I told you how gamophiles also had a six foot hanging maze speaking of giant puzzles they also released this version of that concept apparently this one is a wipe off version that comes with a dry erase marker it's ideal for dorms offices reception rooms playrooms I'm so curious how many people actually solved the entire puzzle there's also a six foot find a phrase which is basically a giant word search and the packaging looks very similar to the crossword I also found this board game called the last word I'm not going to read all of the instructions but you can pause here if you want to learn more about it and then I found ads for this version of a jigsaw crossword that comes packaged in a tube but I couldn't find any photos of this product and it's packaged a little bit differently in the two ads so I don't know which one is more accurate this ad from November 73 has a bunch of their products and it's actually for Abercrombie and Fitch which is kind of funny knowing what that company became we have the shapeless patterns jigsaw puzzle which I've talked about on here before in my rare puzzles video this puzzle I think is advertising what I have although the drawing of the Box isn't quite what my box looked like so I can't be totally certain if that's just an artist's interpretation or if it's a totally different product and then we have the six foot crossword which I just talked about and then finally one more ad which looks a little closer to the box that I have but again just drawn slightly differently and this same ad actually shows a game of files puzzle so they were active at the exact same time and that's all I've got on them so clearly the Lawson's loved jigsaw puzzles and crossword puzzles I'm Gonna Keep researching them if anyone had any of these products or knows anything else about them please get in touch all right and then for our third crossword puzzle jigsaw puzzle of the day I'm going to be doing the game of files cryptic crossword puzzle I talked about this in my recent video all about gamophiles and I went ahead and bought it and it is so satisfying to see it in like in real life because all of the photos online were such low quality so if you don't know a cryptic crossword is a type of crossword that has word play in every single clue so I'm going to give you an example in this puzzle 23 down is is upset by Adam's mate a riddle for you to solve so in cryptic crosswords upset always means anagram so what we're going to take is we're going to anagram it to get s i and that is by Adam's mate which is ease so we put those together and we get Civ and then I had to Google this part but apparently a riddle is a large sieve used to separate soil or compost particles so that is the definition so every single cryptic clue is going to have a definition and then also some word play making up the letters in the clue every time I do cryptics I do a whole lot of very random Googling so after I finish this once again I'll obviously have it scanned for you guys to solve yourself but first let's do it as a jigsaw puzzle and yes this is sealed and yes I will be opening it I've gotten a few comments about that lately about um people who don't like that I open sealed vintage puzzles and I get where you're coming from but also I want to share these puzzles with the world and you can't do that if you keep them in the plastic wrap so all right I'm doing it I'm doing it sorry guys sorry everyone I'm opening it oh this is the first one I've opened that comes with the pen and a little booklet of explanations so here's what the pen looks like even though this was released by gamophophiles they've already started putting The nordevco Branding on here here's some scrap paper let's see if the pen still works ah not so much I think if you wanted to write all over this puzzle you'd have to um get your own pen but don't worry even though I am opening it I'm not going to be writing all over the puzzle I'm not a monster so here we have the answer booklet so we have the answers and an explanation of the clues and I was gonna ask my mom and sister to write explanations of all the clues I guess I don't have to do that I guess they provided that [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you thank you foreign [Applause] okay so I'm an hour and five minutes into it and so far it has been so easy and now it's actually getting really hard you can see that I have pulled out every single little clue that I could possibly find like I did the entire border which has that distinctive Edge and I pulled out all of the numbers and got them in order and I do have the picture right there but I'm trying not to look at it here's just one more shot of the numbers it is super satisfying but then look at this all of these are just lines and blocks and so I think I think I'm gonna have to separate by shape I think that's the only way I'm not gonna be here like literally all day foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] okay I finished it I was actually at the end kind of racing against myself because I have a meeting in 15-20 minutes and I really wanted to get it done before that and I did so that took me two hours and 20 minutes which I think is perfectly fine for a 500 piece puzzle I wouldn't say I liked this one quite as much as the tax form puzzle but I still do think it was a really fun puzzle I mean jigsaw puzzle and then you get a cryptic on top of that foreign [Music] because I already did that in my last video and I'm gonna have a follow-up video coming soon with even more information I just wanted to do this one so I could tell all of you about cryptic crosswords if you're interested in learning how to solve them I'm gonna link Big Dave's little guide to cryptic crosswords down below uh it's a free website it is very comprehensive and I'll have this puzzle and the answer key available for you down below as well but I will say if you get stuck on this particular puzzle um maybe try a more modern cryptic crossword instead of a vintage one the ones that me and my family likes are by Emily Cox and Henry rathbon so I did enjoy putting this puzzle together however I will say that I don't think it is quite as interesting as the other ones just because you don't get anything new from the jigsaw puzzle you know you could solve this puzzle off of the box top like there's no new information that you get from doing the jigsaw part of this whereas the Lawson one at least attempted to make it sort of a game where you're meant to do the jigsaw and the crosswords simultaneously and with the cross jig if you get stuck you can also do the jigsaw simultaneously to sort of give you a hint so okay let's look at some other crossword jigsaw puzzles through the years that have done this idea in an interesting way so in 1994 there was the paguzzle crossword this one has an interesting twist so you solve the crossword on paper then when you put together the jigsaw there are extra answers that are only partially filled in and then there's a postcard in the box and so you fill in the missing answers onto the postcard and you send that in to be entered into a contest everyone who participates gets are you ready for this are you ready they get a pencil but then there's also a grand prize drawing where you could win a computer a vacation a camera or a cruise so if anyone knows who won that grand prize please get in touch and then it must have been successful because there was also a paguzzle 2 in 1995. this time everyone gets a button and there was another grand prize drawing I have to admit I don't fully understand how the missing Clues and answers work maybe I'll have to get one and then do a full-on feature here on the channel okay we're going back in time again this one is super interesting so I was on Bob Armstrong's puzzle site and this is the only place I could find any information about this puzzle this was made by cross jig in 1932 but instead of it being a traditional jigsaw puzzle you have to assemble these Tetris shapes of letters to get them to form the words that answer the clues you can pause and read the whole thing it is a super interesting idea for a puzzle okay so I also found this older Wentworth puzzle and the cool thing about this one is that the Whimsy pieces are letters I would love to try that one out it looks super fun then we've got one that is a three in one puzzle so it's a jigsaw puzzle but one side is a crossword and the other side is a word search this looks super difficult uh there aren't any added Design Elements and the cut of the pieces looks very uniform although for the crossword they did leave the numbers uh right there on the puzzle so you could just put those in order and that would at least get you started okay this one also looks really difficult but I kind of want to solve it this is the 1500 piece ultimate jigsaw ultimate what was it ultimate crossword jigsaw puzzle this came out in 1983 it is four feet long and it is over 900 Clues maybe I'll have to do that on here for Mother's Day next year I guess if you're not gonna have any sort of twist with a crossword puzzle itself just go ahead and make it as giant as you possibly can okay these mini puzzles um number one I love the design on them super retro but number two I learned from Anne Williams's book that this company strategy house was actually an early version of the company that became Stave puzzles Stave is one of the most high quality and expensive wooden puzzle Brands out there so that's a fun connection and an interesting bit of puzzle history and speaking of fun connections I was looking at Ann Williams's Illustrated guide to jigsaw puzzles and I found this crossword Jumble puzzle this was released in the 30s by the company Hall Brothers which can you guess what if you came can you guess it ended up becoming Hallmark interesting that this one also has the tetris shaped puzzle pieces like the one from Cross jig that I just talked about so then as we all know Hallmark ended up going on to release Springbok puzzles during their most like highly collectible years I really like this one the world's most remarkable crossword puzzle it came with 10 copies of the crossword on paper so that you could share them with all of your friends to solve and unlike any of the other puzzles that I've shown since the cross jig back in the 30s they put the gradient on the picture to make it easier to solve as a jigsaw puzzle and not just a sea of black and white squares also for some reason all of the black squares are actually photos of people's faces I guess it was the 70s so Springbok also released a double dilemma question box and the crossword two-in-one puzzle um these were all pretty standard nothing super interesting to get into and then they also did double acrostic which I have right here behind me um this one is an acrostic crossword puzzle I didn't get to solving this one in this video but someday in the future I promise I will get to it okay rapid fire just a couple more examples in 1991 bits and pieces I printed a crossword puzzle tournament puzzle onto a jigsaw there is a double-sided one from England unfortunately I don't really have a lot of information about this one there's a USA Today crossword puzzle uh released by American publishing Co the New York Times released an official crossword jigsaw puzzle in a nice embossed tin and it comes with a very cool pen this one is shaped like a wine bottle which is kind of fun there were these released in 1968. they're only 400 pieces so probably wouldn't be that difficult and there is an fx Schmid puzzle with a dry erase marker and supposedly a wipe clean surface although I'm a little skeptical about how well that actually worked and then again I didn't get to it in this video but the synergistics research co uh released a New York Times crossword puzzle in 1983. the puzzle though is from 1942. it is the first ever New York Times crossword puzzle so this is still sealed this puzzle is fairly rare uh one day when I do my synergistics deep dive I'll get I'll solve this one and I'll show you all all the details and that's everything I was able to find at least vintage ones I'm sure there are a bunch of modern ones and if you know any that are particularly interesting uh feel free to tell me about them down in the comments and also if you like crossword puzzles you're welcome for your new shopping list so what do you think would you want to try a crossword puzzle jigsaw puzzle I do wish more of them had been a little more creative either in the way that the two puzzles interacted with each other or just the decorative elements on the jigsaw puzzle so that it didn't have to just be black and white that's what I tried to do with my puzzle design although now that I've done all of this research I definitely could have added a little more color here in the middle but either way if you want to get one for yourself and try a crossword puzzle designed by me you can download this image down in the description and then get it printed by puzzle U using my promo code all of the information is down in the description and this would make a great Mother's Day gift for any mom who loves crossword puzzles so if you want to see another hybrid uh jigsaw puzzle last year I solved a Sudoku jigsaw puzzle and it was honestly one of the hardest puzzles I have ever done I'll link that down below your code word for the comments will be crossword happy puzzling and I promise in my next video the puzzle that I do will have color in it I've been doing a lot of black and white puzzles lately

Channel: Karen Puzzles

Views: 145,020

Keywords: crossword puzzle, karen puzzles, Jigsaw puzzle, karen puzzles how to do a puzzle, hardest puzzle, hardest puzzle ever, karen puzzles tutorial, jigsaw puzzle tips, how to solve a difficult puzzle, jigsaw puzzle vlog, vintage puzzles, karen puzzles vintage, puzzle history, crossword jigsaw puzzle, cryptic crossword, how to solve a crossword

Id: ZCjEQjQlF20

Length: 49min 33sec (2973 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023