Borderline Newsworthy

ISSUE 1 - August 24, 2026

Welcome to the first “official” update from Borderline Obsessive Puzzles on our journey toward launch. It’s been an incredibly busy few weeks and things are starting to get very real. As in, people are now making actual tools that will eventually make actual BOP puzzles. So we thought it was time to show you what’s happening behind the scenes.

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Puzzle Die

First, a tiny bit of Puzzle Manufacturing 101.

Every jigsaw puzzle gets its pieces from something called a die. Think of it as an enormous, extremely complicated cookie cutter made specifically for puzzles. Hundreds of thin metal blades are bent into all those familiar knobs, sockets and wonderfully weird shapes, then mounted into a large wooden form. During production, a machine presses the die into puzzle board with enough force to cut the entire puzzle at once.

Before you can make a puzzle, somebody has to decide exactly what every single one of those pieces is going to look like. And, because we're apparently incapable of doing anything the easy way, we decided to design ours from scratch.

For speed puzzlers, the cut and fit can make or break the experience. When racing against the clock, we routinely build small sections outside the puzzle frame and then pick them up and move them into place. If the fit is too loose, the whole thing falls apart somewhere between Point A and Point B. Too tight, and you risk damaging pieces during disassembly. And false fits? Nothing makes 60 seconds feel more precious than discovering what looked like a perfect match was actually a false fit. There’s probably a life lesson in there somewhere.

So, instead of choosing an existing die, we’re working with our manufacturing team to create one specific to the way speed puzzlers puzzle.

We call it our Lift & Shift Fit™, a satisfyingly snug connection designed to let you build sections, lift them, shift them into place and keep on puzzling without everything falling apart.

Right now, an experienced die designer is hand-drawing all 500+ pieces of die. Once we’re happy with the drawing, it moves into tooling, where a highly skilled craftsman will hand-bend the metal to match those lines and create the physical die that will cut every BOP puzzle we produce. Yes, by hand.

The whole process takes weeks, and the finished die is one of the biggest investments we’re making in BOP. It’s also the primary dependency standing between us and actual puzzle production, which means we have been watching its progress with a completely reasonable and not at all obsessive amount of interest. (Our manufacturing partners may describe it differently.)

The good news: we expect to see the first preliminary drawing this week, with tooling planned for September and October. If all goes according to plan, that giant puzzle-shaped cookie cutter will be cutting our first production run in late October.

We. Can't. Wait.

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Artwork
Of course, a fantastic puzzle cut isn't much fun without something fantastic printed on it.

Our first production run will include four puzzle titles, and all four have now been selected and licensed from some phenomenal artists. Three will become the beginning of our core BOP collection, while the fourth is something a little different: our first limited edition.

We’re keeping the actual artwork under wraps for just a little longer, but we’ve been obsessing over color, detail, pattern, difficulty and that elusive quality we've started calling the speedable sweet spot: interesting enough to keep you engaged, challenging enough to make you work, and filled with enough visual clues to keep you moving.

And because simply making a limited-edition puzzle wasn't enough for us, we've added a twist. Somewhere among the copies of our first limited edition will be one very special puzzle with a surprise waiting for the person who opens it.

More on that soon. For now, we’ll just say that not every copy of our limited edition will be created equal!

Happy puzzling,

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Speed Puzzling Fun

Jarrett & Vicky competed in a local speed-puzzling event at Odd Birds Gifts in Decatur, GA. This random-cut Galison gave us each a few extra gray hairs and yielded a 5th place finish (out of 9 teams).