About Us

How PUZZINGO™ began

PUZZINGO™ began as a vision that I, Julian Montgomery, had at home alongside another creative project, a children’s poetry book titled Somehow Connected to Me in Some Way. After the book was published, my wife Debbie and I began creating companion items, including 3D-modeled characters from the poems that we designed and manufactured ourselves. Over time, that creativity expanded into making physical puzzles inspired by one of the poems.

Around the same time, my wife had a nightly routine of playing a word game before going to sleep. One evening, as we laid down for the night, I was watching her play her game and thinking about the puzzles we had been creating. I started to wonder: What if a word game and a puzzle could be combined into one experience? Excitedly, I shared the idea with her, and at first, it didn't quite "lock in".

I kept thinking about the idea, writing down notes, and experimenting with possible gameplay rules and scoring. As the concept took shape, I realized it might actually be something special. I reached out to my graphic designer and asked him to create a 100-piece puzzle, with one important requirement, that the pieces had to interlock using straight edges.

Once I had the design, I added letters to each piece and laser-cut the first full set. I sat down with my wife, explained the idea again, and we played the game using the rules and scoring I had developed. That was the moment everything started to make sense, and she immediately fell in love with the concept.

We quickly discovered, however, that the original pieces didn’t interlock as well as we wanted. Since my wife is an architectural designer, she took on the challenge of redesigning the pieces while keeping the straight-edge requirement intact. Together, we refined the angles, size, thickness, and shapes until we landed on puzzle tiles that locked together securely and felt great to play with.

From there, we carefully reviewed the gameplay rules and scoring, refining them again and again. We invited friends to playtest the game and sent copies to close family members for additional feedback. With each round of testing, PUZZINGO™ became more polished and more fun.

Today, the game is ready to be shared. We hope everyone who plays PUZZINGO™ enjoys the challenge, the strategy, and the simple joy of building words with jigsaw-style puzzle tiles.