The Michigan Puzzle club is making space for their hobby

The meetings of the Michigan Puzzle Club are held in a nondescript Mason Hall classroom for two hours on Sunday afternoons — an event I likely wouldn’t have stumbled upon had it not been for a friend who encouraged me to come to a meeting last fall. Though not a consistent participant, I’ve been a silent observer, watching the GroupMe group chat with a growing sense of admiration. It is constantly active; not just with reminders of upcoming meetings, but with photos members send of puzzles they’ve completed over holiday breaks.

“2,000 pieces,” one member will say. “Beautiful!” someone else will write in response.

Over the past year, I have loved watching from the sidelines as this community blossoms, and as University of Michigan students find a sense of belonging within this niche group. But don’t let their friendliness fool you — the puzzlers are devoted to their craft and take their practice seriously.

On a balmy September Sunday, just a few weeks ago, I made my way over to Mason Hall for my second Puzzle Club meeting. As I opened the door, I felt excitement bubble up inside of me as I eagerly anticipated the sense of utter peace I remembered experiencing after my first time puzzling with this group. The atmosphere inside the classroom was a distinct blend of 2010s pop music playing over the speakers and the intense concentration of the puzzlers who showed up to work. They huddled around tables in groups of three or four, each working on a different jigsaw puzzle from a big cart that Michelle Tong, the president and co-founder of the Michigan Puzzle Club, brings to the meeting every week. While most of the puzzles were a patterned array between 500 and 1,000 pieces, two people worked at the front table on a small Dave & Buster’s puzzle the size of a postcard, all orange and navy blue pieces that came in a thin plastic tube.

Assembling jigsaw puzzles is backbreaking work. Each person was leaning over the table awkwardly, necks craning down at inconvenient angles to see the pieces more clearly. I took intermittent breaks to stretch my back, flaunting my novice status in the process. For the majority of the two hours we were together, all of the puzzlers were locked in, focused on developing their strategy — which varied from puzzle to puzzle, but typically involved placing edge pieces together first. A table in the far back with a Van Gogh painting puzzle started with the outer border, but then sorted the remaining pieces into piles based on color, and then assembled what they could based on the few distinguishable shapes there were. Some tables were chatting more than others, but puzzling remained the true focus across the board.

“Do you think it’ll help your puzzle skills if you put your hair up?” I heard someone say from the next table over.

It’s easy to get sucked into a puzzle, I find, but unlike a television show or other forms of equally addictive digital entertainment, I don’t feel regret about my time spent puzzling. Somewhere in the back of my mind I vaguely recalled that jigsaw puzzles are good for your brain, but this fact was secondary to what laid in front of me: a 600-piece world-map puzzle from 2009. After a few moments, I found myself wholly invested in the puzzle’s success; I wanted to see it through until its completion.

While we puzzled, our table chatted. “I’m trying to learn how to share puzzles,” Taubman sophomore Sierra Seidel told me as we sorted continent and ocean pieces out of the box. “I’m used to doing them by myself.”

You would never know, though, with the way she and the rest of our group were so patient with me, humoring my excitement over the novelty of this pastime. For many puzzle club members, this is nothing new. The puzzle club is unified in its collective love for puzzles. Meetings sustain a sanctuary of judgment-free puzzling, a space where anyone can find community or experiment with a new hobby. Even though this meeting was only my second time in attendance across three semesters, I still found it easy to see why the more regular members of the club were so drawn to the captivating, social-puzzling scene. 

The Michigan Puzzle Club was founded in 2023 by Engineering seniors (and puzzle nerds) Tong and Becky So with the intention of creating a low-commitment club where people could bond together over a shared love of jigsaw puzzles. Standing among more than 1,600 other student organizations, the Puzzle Club fills a gap in extracurricular activities left by the clubs and societies that focus primarily on professional development and career readiness. I remember obsessively scrolling through the catalog of these clubs my freshman year and making an over-ambitious list of the ones I hoped to join, each of them direct reflections of what I was studying in my classes. Watching everyone around me commit to so much created this sense of pressure to make everything in my schedule align with the work I wanted to do after graduation. But after a few weeks of this, I quickly realized how unrealistic such ambitions were, and that I didn’t want all of my free time to be filled by other work, even if it was work that I enjoyed doing. Now, I have so much respect for what Puzzle Club is doing in creating a low-stakes hobby-based organization that allows its members to discover a place of balance between work and fun. Tong and So emphasize this informality as a point of pride, describing how the structure of the club does not include taking attendance or requiring membership dues.

“I have to credit (So) for keeping it chill. I remember she was calling it the ‘lowest commitment club on campus,’” Tong said. “We do our best to create a community that people want to come back to, but if people get busy, they get busy.”

In some ways, the structure of Puzzle Club mirrors that of a library. The puzzles are collectively shared, and members borrow one for a meeting at a time before returning them for the next person to create. Tong and So, along with LSA junior Josie Sartin, who hopes to take over the club after they graduate, keep in mind the financial limitations of puzzling as they work to curate a space where puzzles can be accessible and sustainably shared. 

“It’s expensive to buy puzzles,” Tong said. “I think that’s also a really cool benefit of Puzzle Club, that you don’t have to be paying to do all of these puzzles. We provide them.”

Each member of the club brings a different approach to puzzling. Some return to the same puzzle every week with their progress neatly preserved in a rolled up puzzle mat, whereas others bounce around between tables. Some consider looking at the puzzle box’s cover to be cheating, some don’t think it matters. Some puzzlers look to the activity as a form of stress relief. Others seek out opportunities for competition, like at the Puzzle Competition the club held last spring, which they hope to repeat again this semester and next.

“I think the cool thing is that you can choose to make it what you want,” Tong said.

 But even for the most casual of puzzlers, one cannot fully escape the hobby’s allure.

“You always say one more piece, just one more piece. And then time speeds up,” Tong said. 

Her words rang in my ear a few days later as I watched the two-hour meeting fly by. Before I knew it, the final pieces of the puzzle were being fitted into place. The ocean was overlaid with an alphabetical list of countries, and my table had finally established a rhythm in identifying which pieces went where. Quickly, we deconstructed the African continent so we could place the ocean pieces around it. 

Yes, Libya goes here and New Zealand must go here. Does anyone have a piece shaped like — oh, there it is. Our hands and arms were a frenzied blur, snaking in and out of each other to place just one more piece where it was supposed to go. We moved quickly, ramped up with excitement although there was no rush. Now to just reconstruct Africa. And then … tada! 

When we stepped back to look at the completed puzzle, I felt an overwhelming rush of satisfaction. After an average weekend of dreading my to-do list and anxiously working my way through assignments and deadlines, it wasn’t until this moment that I felt like I’d actually accomplished something meaningful. To most, a rendition of a 2009 world map reconstructed with 600 warped pieces of cardboard isn’t much to brag about, but still, it felt good. I figure this must be the feeling puzzlers crave — the knowledge of a job well done, of all the pieces literally sliding into place. 

Then, after taking a few photos to preserve the memory of what we created, the puzzle was disassembled and put back into its box.

“Oh, that’s so sad!” I said to nobody in particular. This experience was new to me. At the previous meeting I went to, we hadn’t finished the puzzle; it had simply been rolled up in a mat and put back into Michelle’s cart. “I can’t believe it’s gone already.”

“I think it’s fun,” Seidel said, and I found myself wanting to agree. “I’m only sad knowing that I can’t do it again.”

Puzzlers have strong opinions about whether or not a puzzle can be repeated after it’s been put together once. But even for those who are content to rebuild a puzzle over and over again, a puzzle’s life expectancy is always short because it inevitably will be destroyed after the first completion. It is a creation bound by a ticking clock; the closer you get to completing it, the closer it gets to death. 

Through the eyes of this community, while silently mourning the loss of the map puzzle, I found myself starting to recognize the beauty of impermanent art. In Puzzle Club, normative standards for productivity and the value of creation are more or less thrown out the window. You puzzle your heart out while you can and find contentment in the building process itself, learning to relinquish the need for a tangible, finished product.

“You do a puzzle and you’re so proud of your work and you have something to show for it, and then it gets scrapped at the end. You might have a picture but who are you going to be showing that picture to?” Tong said. “I feel like the ability to send your work (in the group chat) and be like, ‘This is what I did, this is what I’m proud of’ … I think that’s something really cool to share.”

Puzzlers create something knowing it will soon be destroyed. On a college campus, where every precious second is spoken for somewhere in a Google Calendar, it becomes especially meaningful that there is an established group of people willing — nay, wanting — to carve out two hours every Sunday for a pastime that requires you immediately undo what you accomplish. Is puzzling not an act of bravery, then? A radical form of defiance against hyperscheduled lives of monotony? 

“I just don’t think you can beat a jigsaw puzzle,” Tong said. And there’s a whole community of people behind her that agrees. 

Statement Columnist Katie Lynch can be reached at katiely@umich.edu.

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