Obsessive. Addictive. Maybe even a little dangerous.
Once Christina Landeryou starts, she can’t stop. The puzzle has to be finished.
“If I start Saturday morning, I’ll probably not do anything else until Sunday afternoon,” she said.
Even if her back starts to ache from leaning over the table she’ll keep going.
“That’s the price you pay for having a Liberty puzzle obsession,” she said.
She’s not the only Durango resident obsessed with the wooden puzzles. Around town, small groups coordinate which ones to buy, passing them from hand-to-hand to avoid repeats. Names are written inside the boxes. Completed puzzles travel from living room to living room, sometimes for years.
“It’s an affliction,” said Yuri Potemkin, another puzzle fan.
But this isn’t about just any puzzle. The obsession centers on a specific kind: Liberty Puzzles.
The Boulder-based company makes intricate wooden puzzles with pieces engineered to interlock in unexpected ways – twisting, curving and forming whimsical shapes that turn the puzzle into a challenge but also a kind of art. Unlike traditional cardboard puzzles, no two pieces are alike. Many are cut into recognizable figures like animals, people or symbols that echo the image itself.
“They’re works of art,” Landeryou said.
That craftsmanship comes with a price. Liberty puzzles can cost far more than a typical jigsaw, putting them out of reach as a casual purchase. Instead, they circulate.
Friends coordinate to avoid buying the same design, swapping puzzles once they’re completed.
“You can see how many times people do them,” Kate Potemkin said. “They’re like an heirloom puzzle.”
The system has grown organically. A friend brings one over. Someone gets hooked. Another family starts buying them for birthdays or holidays.
“We started going, ‘OK, nobody get the same puzzle,’” Yuri Potemkin said.
For Landeryou, the appeal is partly the ability to completely zone out, which has been harder to find in an increasingly screen-dominant world.
“You’re working toward a goal, and then you achieve this completed puzzle at the end,” she said. “You don’t get that reward just scrolling through Instagram.”
On Instagram, one is more likely to receive “feelings of inadequacy,” she surmised. Puzzles don’t have the same effect of dampening ones self-esteem.
“It feels a lot better to just be not thinking hard, looking at the wooden pieces versus looking at a screen,” she said.
For Ken Golden, Landeryou’s law partner and frequent puzzle-trading companion, the obsession is also the challenge, and the focus required to complete them.
“If I’m going to do one, I do it in one day," he said. This is a highly impressive time-frame, Landeryou said, and compared to the Potemkins’ more casual, drawn-out-approach.
Where Landeryou chips away at a puzzle over a full weekend, Golden often does it in just a few hours.
“He is more insane and obsessed with it then I am,” she said of her colleague. “He’s almost like a puzzle savant.”
Golden has a flat affect when discussing his unique skillset, and side-stepped any openings he could use to boast about his wicked fast puzzling.
“I certainly have friends that do take a long time to do it. I seem to be able to do it much faster than others,” he said, the only bit of shoulder patting he was willing to give himself.
To some, Golden’s approach to puzzling might seem moderately torturous. He doesn’t look at the cover, and regularly orders the most difficult of Liberty’s Puzzle’s.
He recently completed the Kaleidoscope puzzle, at 1,200 pieces it is the company’s largest (it took Golden a day and a half to finish it) and at $425 also the most expensive. The average price point sits roughly around $115, which is a steep cost for a puzzle, Golden and the other puzzlers acknowledged.
His secret is just focus.
“I just focus on getting it done,” he said.
That focus is part of the draw. So is the unpredictability. Some puzzles include “negative space,” with gaps that break the traditional square shape. Others don’t include a reference image at all. Recently, the company has sold “mystery” puzzles – customers order them without knowing what the final picture will be.
For dedicated puzzlers, that added difficulty is part of the appeal.
“You don’t even know what it is,” Kate Potemkin said.
In rare cases, customers have taken it further – commissioning custom puzzles or combining multiple designs into one, turning an already intricate activity into something even more complex.
Still, for most in Durango’s puzzle circles, the appeal remains simple: a shared, tactile experience that pulls people away from their phones and into the same space.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, demand surged. At one point, buyers had to wait in an online queue just for the chance to purchase a puzzle.
“It was like getting tickets for a concert,” Yuri Potemkin said.
For the Potemkins, puzzling picks up over the winter time, when both their daughters are home. A puzzle might sit out for days, drawing people in and out of the room. Conversations happen over scattered pieces. Music plays in the background. Someone cooks while another searches for the next fit.
“It’s probably the most concentrated time we have where everybody in the family isn’t looking at their phone,” Kate Potemkin said.
Frustration is a part of the experience as well. There will be time when 20 minutes pass without placing a single piece, a hair-pulling experience, the Potemkins said.
“You walk away for five minutes and then you come back and you’re like, ‘Oh, I know where everything goes now,’” Yuri Potemkin said.
There are rules too, in the Potemkin household. If you help, you get to sign the box, Kate Potemkin said. And no one finishes the puzzle alone.
“The only time there’s conflict is when you get to the last few pieces,” she said.
jbowman@durangoherald.com
