Puzzles and Lego: The Games They Play

 AN ELVEN SANCTUARY IS materialising in a corner of my home. In JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, Riven­dell is a safe haven for the heroic and the virtuous, untouched by time and protected by magic as much as mountains—an idyllic landscape, drawn from the author’s hikes in Switzerland, particularly the Lauterbrunnen Valley, in 1911. Its autumnal colours, gardens, halls and iconic characters rise on the base of a glass-top table—one Lego brick and tile at a time. While it grows, another legendary character waits to be unboxed, a Tyrannosaurus Rex straight from the precari unboxed, a Tyranno­saurus rex straight from the precarious badlands of Jurassic Park accompanied by miniature characters from the movie.

The Rivendell set is one of Lego’s big­gest designs, a scene comprising 6,167 pieces; the T-rex has fewer pieces, about 3,145 of them, but it is grand in size. At 12 inches of height and 41 inches of length, it will require us to rethink our home decor when my spouse and I start build­ing it. These sets come in a chaotic mix of shades and shapes, packed in dozens of paper bags, sequenced according to the order of construction along with books of pictorial instructions. Making a set demands attention to the placement of every piece—based on numbers and skin­ny red lines running across the pictures. Every step compounds the previous ones, and one is often surprised at how an in­nocuous set of bricks goes from a nonde­script structure one moment to the hull of a spaceship in the next.

The biggest brick and tile will, at best, span the length of a palm; most are the size of a finger, many just enough to match up to a nail bed. Building the set is an exercise in engineering and mar­vel. A group of flat grey bricks end upbecoming a watch tower and a bridge over a pool made of smooth blue panels. A set of mall tiles culminates in a book­case while mini bars topped with even smaller flames transform into candela­bras. Tiny, expressive faces and torsos fit together to form tall elves, which be­come—a few steps later—statues over­looking the castle. Size can be challeng­ing and time-consuming, but sometimes, assembling a smaller item with multiple tiny pieces can also turn out to be a men­tal HIIT session. Think meditation isn’t for you? Try building a Lego set.

Over the years, Lego—the behemoth that grew out of a carpenter’s shop in Bil­lund, Denmark—has become one of the world’s most influential brands. Yet it seems to have come to the company’s at­tention only in recent years that its imagi­native, whimsical build-it-yourself toys for kids end up seducing people in com­pletely different age groups: the adults. It is somewhat late to the party.

Grownups have been at play long be­fore brands and trendspotters figured it out. Once, the ancient card game of gan­jifa appeared in Mughal texts and minia­ture art centuries before the Indian artist duo Thukral and Tagra, who have made play intrinsic to their practice, turned the game into an interactive art meets board game experience tilted the Walk of Life, based on the players’ karma count. Leonardo da Vinci detailed his work with puzzles and is now often cited as an inspiration among puzzle-makers. In the past century, Stephen Sondheim used to craft elaborate puzzles and trea­sure hunts to play along with friends while Queen Elizabeth II is said to have enjoyed jigsaws. Now there’s Ed Sheer­an, who gathers a va­riety of toys at home and famously, and per­haps not so graciously, decided to make a Lego set during a date. And, these are just the famous names and instances.

Adults build Lego sets and jigsaw puz­zles, dollhouses and scale model cards. They battle over tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) and lose themselves in strategy board games with intricate storylines. The games themselves are no child’s play—large, complex and modu­lar. Jigsaw puzzles created by the German brand Ravensburger, which has gained a cult following in India, are scenes from cities, art and fantasy realms—with some puzzles going up to 7,000 to 9,000 pieces. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), perhaps the most famous TTRPG, has enchanted thousands into playacting their way through imaginary worlds. Campaign for North Africa, a World War II-themed board game designed in the 1970s, has become infamous for its running time— with multiple players, it is said to take about 1,500 hours as players must go everything from war raids to pro­curing water for pasta. Bears vs Babies, a card game packed into a fuzzy brown box, is significantly simpler in its structure but hardly lacking in adult-appropriate edgi­ness. Its players must, after all, “build handsome, incredible monsters who go to war with horrible, awful babies.” If Snakes and Ladders or Ludo had our attention as children, now we can spend hours poring over strategy games—on the landscape of a patterned board, we may become anything—intergalactic soldiers, medieval knights, pirates or set­tlers in a new frontier.

In market jargon, this unbridled joy has come to be labelled as kidulting— a cultural trend encompassing consump­tion patterns conventionally associated with children. In the US, adults are said to spend over $7 million on toys for them­selves while they contributed about £1 in every £3 spent on toys in the UK. In India, the market is still niche but brimming with potential as grownups find access to new brands and products and a culture around games grow at homes, offices and social spaces such as board game cafes.

As with many new-age labels, kidult­ing can be a limiting idea. It presupposes that games are for children; adults who enjoy toying with dolls or spend pre­cious weekends building castles and puzzles must be trying to connect with their “inner child”. Twist the thought hard enough and kidulting becomes a terrible habit—a means of shirking one’s social and moral responsibilities in the world, hobbies of people unable to break out of their Peter Pan syndrome. Or there is the overemphasis on viral moments such as the fleeting frenzy for Labubus earlier this year; the furry toy by Pop Mart broke sales records and landed on handbags around the world (not just the original but millions of knockoffs known as the Lafufu). But it was a performative trend, meant less for play and more for display. Labubus may come and go, but we are not playing for trends and validation. The intention isn’t to draw attention. When someone suggests that we make a timelapse video of making our Lego Rivendell set, my husband scoffs. “We are making a castle, not content.”

SINCE THE FIRST LEGO STORE opened in India earlier this year, the footfall has included a fair share of grownups brows­ing the shelves to find sets for themselves. Jayadev Calamur was one of them. The Pune-based communications professional remembers having a couple of Lego sets, among other puzzles, when his fam­ily lived in the UK where the brand was easily accessible. Years later, in the Lego Gurugram outlet, he felt like a child in a candy store—though his interest has little to do with childhood nostalgia. “I got back to puzzles a few years ago when my wife bought me a Lego botanicals set,” he says. It’s a different experience as an adult. I am fascinated with the idea of building and I appreciate the process,” he says. They buy about two sets each year, which have so far included a powder blue Vespa, movie characters such as Wall-E and Eva and a version of the famous 19^th century wood­block print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. Right now, he is midway through a convertible Porsche model and has a few sets featuring Vincent Van Gogh’s works in his wishlist.

Not all toys are meant for play. Collect­ible toys, although meant for showcase, become an expression of personal inter­ests and fandom. Paulami Guha Biswas, a Kolkata-based academic has built a sizeable assortment of toys, mainly pop culture and action figurines which are displayed on her bookshelves. From gath­ering Funko Pop! vinyl figures to tracking down toys related to lesser-known Thai television shows, Guha Biswas has often turned her search for toys into minor quests. But it would be a stretch to label them as playthings—she isn’t playing house with Doctor Who and Batman. “I began collecting toys because I wanted to go beyond the text,” she says. “These were shows and stories I loved and I wanted a carry a part of them with me. Toys became a joyful way to do that.”

Toy collectors may not play with their goodies, but they put a lot of time and effort into building collections and finding rare models. At Tokyo stores, retailing toys and merchandise from fa­mous manga and anime one finds adults carefully going through shelves to find the right picks for their collection. Ask for a bobblehead at such stores, and those manning the cash counter stare back in horror and mild fury. “We don’t sell that,” they say, implying that it is not a place one comes seeking silly souvenirs. In India, collectible toys ar­rived much later and the appetite for toys is rising though the offerings re­main limited.

Unlike collect­ible toys, puzzles and strategy games engage people in activity. Calamur recalls how a chance visit to Avengers, a store in Bandra, Mumbai, got him into collect­ibles. “I collected for a few years and dis­played them as well,” he says. These days, however, he prefers putting up his Legos on display. “It feels like a labour of love.”

Jigsaw puzzles can evoke a similar sentiment, says Prernna Gupta, a Chen­nai-based business executive who, along with her family, has been been actively puzzling for the last few years particu­larly since the pandemic. For Gupta, jig­saw puzzles are a stress-buster as well as a means to put digital devices aside and focus on an activity. “Adults often think they should go for bigger puzzles, in 1,000 pieces or more. I personally gravitate to­wards lower piece counts and mini puz­zles,” she says, adding that it is a thought­ful choice. “As adults, sometimes, we go through our day feeling like we haven’t accomplished much. I can complete a smaller puzzle in, say, 45 minutes or so and it gives me a sense of accomplish­ments.” A slow puzzler, Gupta carried mini puzzles in her bag, assembling them on the go instead of scrolling and streaming. More recently, she launched The Puzzlist, a small-batch jigsaw puzzle brands created with artists, and dedicated to her mother who loved solving puzzles.

Getting off social media and doing tactile activities also led Aditi Padiyar, a development professional working with global non-profits, to games. Her choices veer towards strategy games that keep her mind sharp. “I’ve never been into any other form of gaming but board games feel intellectually stimulating and I mostly continue to do it because it helps me be present,” she says. “I don’t care about win­ning as much as I do about learning. Most have an asymmetri­cal game play, which means no two games are identical and it’s always interesting.”

Padiyar began buying strategy games while she lived in Delhi; since she moved to Canada a few years earlier, her collection has grown. On their own, she and her partner turn to two-player games such as Azul, Duel and Game of Go. “With friends, who are also obsessed with games, we play Root, Catan, and Dune because they usually go on for hours,” she says. “I’ve always enjoyed them but haven’t had much access in India to strategy games that are played internationally. During Covid, we discov­ered Catan and D&D and once we moved, friends introduced us to games like Secret Hitler and Coup. The board game com­munity online is also super engaging and more welcoming.”

GAMES HAVE INDIVIDUAL appeal but they are also social activities. They are meant to be played with each other. As Ga­brielle Zevin writes in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be ex­posed, to be hurt...To play requires trust and love.” Players find their communities not just through physical spaces but also online; while games are a means to dis­connect digitally, it is often social media that brings people together. Padiyar finds company with other strategy game en­thusiasts. Gupta eschews speed puzzling competitions but has gotten together with other enthusiasts to make puzzles like the Ravensburger Krypt series, a particular gruelling exercise because the puzzles are composed of a single colour or a gradient. At home, we often look up creators who remake Lego sets into new custom designs.

What trends often don’t encapsulate about this adult desire for play is that it is not a brief, transitory phase. It is a lifelong choice, rooted in the understanding that play never stops unless we let it. Gupta says that she is amassing a collection of puzzles to assemble decades later, when she retires. Calamur perseveres for weeks and months, and in the face of misplaced bricks. “If I realise I have made a mistake, I dismantle the whole thing and rebuild it from scratch.”

Besides, games can shapeshift, toys can transmogrify. Think of the Lego dinosaur which, in creative hands, can be rebuilt into a Xenomorph. Think of the jigsaw puzzles which can be remade in many dif­ferent ways. Think of Dungeons & Drag­ons and strategy games whose stories will go anywhere a player wishes to take them. We grow with our toys and games. But our toys and games can also grow with us.