Meet the Puzzlers: Super Seniors

With our Chillin’ Puzzle Competition coming up this week, we want to spotlight the legendary puzzle team – the team to beat – that dominated our last two puzzle competitions. That team is Super Seniors. As their name hints, at the time of its making, the team included four Iowa State undergraduate seniors – Morgan, Keigan, Amanda, and Jessica. When they revealed they all majored in architecture, the rest of the puzzle teams in the room let out groans, sure that Super Senior’s architectural schooling helped them win the competition.

Of course, I asked if practice and schooling gave them an advantage, and the team members feigned confusion and joked, “What? We’ve actually never done this before.”

When we started puzzle competitions at Dog-Eared Books, our House team was WAY too confident. They bragged about the impossibility of losing the competition. They wore matching store sweatshirts (which looked awesome). Then out of nowhere sprang Super Seniors, who claimed first prize with a time of two hours and forty-four seconds. Our house team hasn’t been at the puzzle competition since…And Super Seniors noticed. At the next competition, they asked where our House team was, and when met with explanations of birthdays, vacations, and more, Super Seniors said these “excuses” were “real convenient.” Seems like a challenge, House Team.

Super Seniors went on to win the next puzzle competition, too. Most recently, they finished their 1000-piece puzzle in one hour, forty-four minutes, and thirty-four seconds. Our awesome second place team, Corner’s First, finished in two hours and seven minutes, and our third place team finished in two hours, twenty-nine minutes, and thirty-three seconds. So how does Super Seniors blow the competition out of the water? 

In their own words, they “come for seriousness, not for fun.” These puzzlers train often. They have their own weekly puzzle night where they hone their skills. Three of the Super Seniors members come from puzzling families where puzzling rules the holiday season, and the fourth is “just competitive.” As soon as they open the puzzle, they sort the pieces in various piles by color and edge-type. They assign each other various roles that shift as the puzzle nears completion.

The Super Seniors with their puzzle, team name tag, first place certificate, and prizes at our Floral Fun Puzzle competition.

While these strategies are successful, they aren’t necessarily pretty. As a group, they agreed that “teamwork does not work.” Instead, they rely on communication (and not the nice kind), apparently calling dibs and yelling at one another for holding pieces hostage or dropping them on the floor. They say that when they work on puzzles, it’s basically a game of twister with people just reaching over each other and crossing arms. Even the team’s origin is a little tyrannical. Team member Amanda saw our first ever puzzle competition post right as it came out and texted her friends asking if they wanted to participate. Her friends did not respond quickly, so she just signed them up anyway. It was a bold move, and it made Dog-Eared Books history. From the outside, though, the team looks like a well-oiled machine. Fierce, organized, and surprisingly fun despite their cold views on puzzling protocol. 

This iconic team’s record time at our store may actually never be broken, but for those who’d like to try, our next puzzle competition is on July 14, 2023. We’ll also have puzzle competitions in October 2023, January 2024, April 2024. Though all of the Super Seniors members graduated in May and trekked out to different parts of the country, they left some advice for future teams who will try to fill the void they left behind:

“Be aggressive. You gotta stretch.”