Saturday, September 4, 2010

Throw a Puzzle Party!

Our ongoing weekend survey of gaming-related ephemera continues, with this The Puzzle Party insert included with Springbok brand jigsaw puzzles circa the late 1960s/early 1970s, judging from the hairstyles and references to "op art" puzzle designs:


In this era of multiplayer casual videogaming, maybe we'll see a resurgence of this sort of thing.  Get some friends together, hand out the Wii or Move remotes or line small groups up in front of the Kinect camera, and be the perfect party host or hostess.

Picking out a videogame that expresses best your own personality and good taste might be a bit of a challenge.  And special puzzle refreshments might be hard to transpose to the new paradigm -- homemade Puzzle Cookies and Jig-Saw Pizza are unlikely to be matched by Super Mario macaroni and cheese, Sonic the Hedgehog fruit roll-ups and Halo Mountain Dew.

And it's not the seventies anymore, so using interlocking name tags as a "mixer" for pairing seems a bit graphic by contemporary standards.  I've zoomed in and decoded the brochure's subliminal imagery using the magic of digital photo editing, below.  You can see that unless Kitty and Bill know each other intimately, and the nature of their relationship is understood among friends, this kind of thing could easily be taken the wrong way:


Some things are, perhaps, best left in the past.

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