Wicked Quick’s Puzzle Story: 

Wicked Quick is a speed puzzling team that found themselves winning 3rd place in the Teams Division at the 2024 USA Jigsaw Nationals! The team is comprised of Emily C. (she/her), Emma P. (she/her), Mari (she/her), and Sammy B. (she/her). Sammy is from Connecticut, and the rest of the team hail from Massachusetts. 

In the team’s words: “We met collectively in-person for the first time on December 2, 2023 for a team practice and discovered we have very different personalities! We gel in a way that’s really amazing and fun, and we have become great friends through puzzling. We support each other, laugh together, playfully poke fun at each other, keep each other on our toes, and the team is really starting to feel like family. We’re also becoming increasingly infamous for our furry mascots (we each have one), who help us out with puzzle stuff and are frequently involved in our team doings.

Emily (a PhD Student) is our “Pterodactyl” who uses her astounding reach to deliver exactly the piece(s) any of us needed before we knew to look for it. She’s our resident sprinter, with sub-4 minute 100-piece puzzle times! She is also our resident snacker, so it’s only fitting that her mascot is the adorable plush orange known as “Lil’ Clem”. When our team meets for weekend practices, Emily is always the first to start puzzling in the morning and the last to quit before bed. We often wake up to the sound of clicking pieces on the practice table…it’s always her!

Emma (a Software Engineer) is our “Sunshine” for her amazing positive energy and her scorching speed!. She is the ingenious brain behind our team name which honors our collective New England home. She can see color differentiations that no one else can, which makes her a serious force both on the puzzle table and in the crafting world. When she’s not wearing her WQ team uniform, you’ll probably see her sporting some kind of puzzle-themed crochet fashion that she has designed and built! Emma’s mascot is a multi-colored hedgehog named “Hue”, who she – you guessed it – crocheted herself.

Mari (a Musician) is “The Dragon” – part kitty, part wrecking ball.  She’s the teammate most likely to have pulled a recent practical joke and the person most likely to  respond to a new puzzling P.R. with, “Cool…and now we do it faster.” When not puzzling, she is a professional violinist/fiddler, which means she’s probably one of the only touring musicians in the world to travel with practice puzzles in her instrument case. You can spot Mari at a puzzle competition by looking for her mascot “Cooo”, the adorable “heelan’ coo” (highland cow) who she adopted in Scotland several years ago.

Sammy (previously a Middle School Assistant Teacher) we call “The Bat” because she is able to puzzle at the same speed upside-down as right side-up, making her our not-so-secret weapon for team puzzling! She’s also our team’s puzzle librarian, making each of us many generous practice puzzle loans from her jaw-dropping puzzle collection. She is also our resident nerd, wooden puzzle specialist, and best friend of mascot “Chombie”, aka Charles “Chuck” Chombat III.”

The team is participating in as many SpeedPuzzling.com events as they can before their upcoming trip to Spain for the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship in September. 

Q&A Time:

What is your team’s advice for someone who wants to improve their speed puzzling abilities?

“The most important thing to keep in mind for any aspiring speedster, is that no matter how crazy fast some of these times look, all of the skills needed for this are learnable, trainable, and improvable! We recommend practicing and analyzing specific parts of your strategy and mentality to identify where your weaknesses are, then devise fun ways to improve these skills. For example, we timed ourselves flipping 500 pieces individually, and drilled just flipping until everybody could do it in 3:30 or less. Our team has gotten to where we are today by training specific skills and putting a variety of strategies in our toolbelt.”

What do you enjoy most about puzzling?

Emily: “I am a very team-motivated person as well as a huge nerd who loves problem-solving, so Speed Puzzling (especially on a team!) has quickly become my favorite hobby. Every puzzle presents a unique optimization problem to be solved, and I love working with others on figuring out the fastest way to solve a puzzle. I enjoy all aspects of this learning process--strategizing beforehand, problem-solving on the table, and reflecting afterwards--and find it rewarding to see our improvements over time (with lots of practice!).”

Emma: “I feel fully focused and present when I am puzzling, and I love feeling the positive effect that this has on my mental health. I get a strong sense of fulfillment whenever I achieve a new personal or team best, and whenever I meet other people who love puzzling. I feel that we all puzzle in different ways, for different reasons, and we all can’t wait to compare notes and cheer each other on.”

Mari: “I love the challenge of it, and all the strategy involved.  I’m a huge nerd for tactics and technique, and I love working on constantly optimizing different aspects of the craft. I really enjoy that there’s ALWAYS something to improve, and there’s nothing more fun than absolutely crusin’ through a really fast puzzle!  I feel like a racecar driver!”

Sammy: “I love the different "flavors" of puzzlers: everyone has their own motivations and preferences and I never get tired of hearing about what draws someone to this hobby. Some love to puzzle for the mental health benefits, while others love the competition of speed puzzling. Puzzlers' image preferences can get specific to an extreme degree and I especially love the joy of finding out that someone shares the same odd obsession. For example, I've formed friendships over loving to puzzle things like house siding and yarn!”

Does your team have a shared treasured moment?

“Making our team debut at Nationals was pretty incredible, and none of us will ever forget the moment when we finished the final puzzle during the team competition! We had no idea where we had finished or how much time we had made up on that challenging Elspeth McLean mandala puzzle (we were 5th coming out of the first puzzle.) The last piece went in and all four of us just froze and basically couldn’t even breathe. It was so tense!  When our row judge called our placement, we all collapsed on the table in a group hug!  We knew there was a world in which an underdog team could make it to the podium of Nationals and we trained so hard to make it a possibility. To have it actually come true was completely magical!”

Connect:

The members of Wicked Quick can be found on Instagram:

Mari: @marilovespuzzles

Emily: @emilythepuzzlenerd

Emma: @emmapanada

Sammy: @keepinthepiece

Follow the team on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61562913119665&mibextid=LQQJ4d