Origins
A Short History of the Packing Puzzle
Quasi Puzzle is a digital recreation of a classic mechanical puzzle — a set of flat, rounded pieces that lock together to fill a frame. Here is what is known about where puzzles like it come from, and, just as importantly, what isn't.
Hold one of the original pieces and it looks deceptively simple: a flat disc, roughly the size of a large coin, with gentle bumps bulging from its rim and matching notches cut into it. On its own it does nothing. Put thirteen of them together, though, and every bump has to nest into a neighbour's notch until the whole set lies flat inside its frame — no gaps, nothing overlapping. That is the entire puzzle, and it is far harder than it sounds.
A puzzle you pack, not a picture you build
This belongs to a family that collectors call packing puzzles (or, more broadly, assembly puzzles): the goal is to fit every piece into a defined space, with no picture to guide you. That makes it a cousin of the jigsaw, whose commercial history is usually traced to the London mapmaker John Spilsbury around 1760, who glued maps onto wood and cut out the countries as a teaching aid. Jigsaws for adults did not become a craze until roughly 1907–1910, and the hardest of those early puzzles were made deliberately without a reference image on the box.
Our puzzle strips the idea back even further. There is no picture at all — only geometry. You are not restoring an image; you are solving a spatial packing problem, which is exactly why the same set of pieces can be arranged correctly in many different ways rather than in one.
Built from a circle packing
The pieces are not arbitrary blobs. Each one is a circle, and the whole set is derived from a packing of equal circles — the tight, honeycomb-like arrangement in which every circle touches six neighbours. Wherever two of those circles meet, the design gives one piece a small convex lens (a bump) and gives the neighbour the exact complementary hollow (a notch). Bump fits notch, the two curves cancel, and the pieces interlock while still tiling the surface perfectly. The geometry of that is covered on the Mathematics page.
The underlying motif — a lattice of overlapping circles — is ancient. Grids of interlocking circles turn up as a decorative pattern in mosaics, metalwork and manuscripts across many cultures and many centuries, long before anyone turned the idea into a boxed puzzle. In that sense the look of the puzzle is far older than any particular edition of it.
The editions we can actually point to
Physical versions of round, interlocking packing puzzles have been produced commercially in more than one country and more than one era — in wood, in cardboard, and in moulded plastic. One well-documented example is a mass-produced boxed set from the Soviet consumer-goods industry: a printed rules sheet, a plastic tray and pieces, and the standardised product markings of its day. Modern hobbyists have revived the concept too; several designers have published 3D-printable "bubble packing" puzzles built, like this one, from overlapping circles.
On the question of origin
It would be easy to attach a tidy origin story to a puzzle like this — a single inventor, a date, a country. We are not going to, because we could not verify one. Despite the surviving editions, we have not found a reliable source that identifies who first designed this specific circle-packing puzzle, when, or where, and we would rather leave an honest gap than invent a legend. What can be said fairly is that it is one instance of a much older and broader idea, that no single nation can claim to have originated it, and that it has been reproduced — independently and repeatedly — wherever people enjoy a good spatial challenge.
If you happen to own documentation — a patent, a catalogue, a dated box — that pins down its history, we would genuinely like to see it. There is a contact page for exactly that.
What Quasi Puzzle is
Quasi Puzzle, published by TiSch, is a faithful digital version of that classic packing puzzle. It keeps the original mechanic exactly — the same interlocking pieces, the same frame, the same "lie flat with no gaps" goal — and adds a few things a physical set never could: unlimited hints, a picture mode that prints an image of your choosing across the pieces, colour skins, a solutions gallery, and an optional online leaderboard. If you haven't tried it yet, the puzzle is one click away.
Sources & further reading
- Jigsaw puzzle — history of tiling and assembly puzzles (Wikipedia).
- Circle packing — the geometric idea the pieces are based on (Wikipedia).
- Puzzle — overview of mechanical and assembly puzzles (Wikipedia).
This page reflects what we were able to verify at the time of writing. If you can improve it with a documented source, please get in touch.