About Us

About PuzzlEd

My first recollections of working with mechanical and logic puzzles were at my grandparents’ house where my grandfather (Grandpa Free) had a few lying around. There is one puzzle sometimes called “Instant Insanity” that my grandfather had duplicated using cardboard and construction paper, and I enjoyed solving it.

In Junior High and High School, if I finished a class assignment before the rest of the class, I would often turn my paper over and draw mazes on the back to fill the time. After my older sister and her husband got me a book of mazes for Christmas one year, my maze drawing took a significant turn as I was able to copy the techniques I saw others use to make vast improvements.

My first mechanical puzzle idea came in a serendipitous manner. Back in the days before computers, we often used paper with holes punched in it for a three-ring binder. One day, I was lifting a sheet off of my desk and a small metal ball I had there rolled across the paper and dropped through one of the holes. I had a “Eureka!” moment and within a few days had constructed a 3D maze out of cardboard and clear plastic. The object was to drop the ball into a hole in the top and work it down through the proper series of holes to get it out the bottom. Before it was over, I built 3 more variations of the maze, each getting a little more difficult to solve. Of course, I soon saw a similar maze for sale in the store, but I wasn’t surprised that I wasn’t the first to have this idea.

I think my second design was what I call the “Shape Maze” that I cut out of a 1×10 board using a dowel rod to hold the different shapes. In my first job on a construction site, I was around a number of people who liked puzzles, so I learned about many different types and began to visualize some modifications to some that I encountered there. In fact, most of the engineers I worked with in that office liked puzzles, so I began to assume that all (or at least most) engineers were “puzzle people”. I later learned that that is not necessarily the case!

Through the 1990’s and early 2000’s, I conceived of several new designs. Often, I would see a shape or mechanism and begin to play with how I could turn it into a puzzle. Several of my puzzles could be put into “families” where they are variations of similar mechanisms. As I stated earlier, I have several variations on mazes moving balls or other objects through a series of paths to reach a desired destination.

I have built prototypes of most of my ideas, with a few still to be developed, and I hope to bring more of them to my online store in the future. Unfortunately, intellectual property protection isn’t cheap, and if it hits this website unprotected, it is available to anyone.

The most important thing is that someone is enjoying the challenges and getting a little entertainment out of these. I welcome feedback and would love to hear from you about how you enjoyed (or didn’t) the puzzle and any ideas for improvement. If there is enough interest, I could offer Triple Trouble with a new and perhaps more challenging solution. I also have a significantly more complex version of Fowl Play that could be printed for the hardcore enthusiast.