Tasty Puzzle Company

Back in 2020, we launched Magic Puzzles on Kickstarter and became the most-backed, highest-funded puzzle project of all time. Now that we're finally ready to share Tasty Puzzles, we're returning to a crowdfunding/pre-order system to help get our first printing out into the world. Here's why:

1. A pre-order helps us figure out how many puzzles to print so we don't immediately go out of stock. When we launched Magic Puzzles, our goal was to raise about $40,000. We dramatically underestimated public interest and ended up needing to print over 7,600% more puzzles than we originally planned! If we didn't do a Kickstarter, we might have been sold out for months while we caught up with demand.
2. Cash flow. Tasty Puzzle Company is a tiny business, and we can't afford to make too many puzzles in our first run without the risk of going into massive, life-ruining debt. By taking pre-orders, everyone who really wants a puzzle is guaranteed get one, and we don't risk going out of business in the process.
3. Figuring out which puzzles people want. We want to launch a whole "series" of puzzles to show what we're about, and your pre-orders will help us figure out how many of each puzzle to order.
4. Doing something cool for our fans! Finally, doing a pre-order lets us connect with the Tasty Puzzles Sardaukar — the day-one fans — and do something cool for them. In this case we've made an exclusive bonus puzzle that you can only get by ordering the Series One Bundle!

Tasty Puzzles feature a BRAND NEW illusion at the end that's totally different from what's in Magic Puzzles. It looks incredible when photographed or recorded on your phone, and it's effortless to perform and share with your friends. We love the reactions it's gotten in playtesting, and we think you'll love it, too.

"Puzzle Dust" is little particles of cardboard that come loose when a puzzle is die cut. It's a serious nuisance in the world of jigsaw puzzles!

Each Tasty Puzzle is individually sifted by hand to remove as much dust as possible before the pieces are packed in resealable bags. We think we're the only company in the world that spends the time and money to do this.

For obvious reasons, we can't guarantee the removal of every granule of dust. In almost every puzzle, our process removes enough dust from the box so that whatever remains is imperceptible—that's what we mean when we say "no puzzle dust." Occasionally, we see cases of human error where a small amount of dust is left in with the pieces. So far, the most puzzle dust we've measured in a Magic Puzzle is 0.25g (about 1/3 the weight of one average 0.8g puzzle piece), and we're always working with our factory to improve the process.

International shipping is expensive because puzzles are transported on multiple airplanes, boats, and trucks across long distances and go through complex customs and handling steps that add cost.

Nobody wishes that international shipping was cheaper more than we do!

High shipping rates put us in a difficult position. If we only ship to the U.S., some customers will be upset because they can't order the puzzles. And if we ship outside of the U.S., other backers will be upset because of the high international shipping cost.

We think the option that's the most fair and will upset the fewest customers is to make Tasty Puzzles available in as many countries as possible and charge the lowest possible price by offering shipping "at cost" — meaning you pay what we pay (and we make absolutely no profit on the shipping fee).

If something goes wrong and you're missing a piece — or if anything else is wrong with your puzzle — we will work with you to make things right!

The good news is that missing pieces are extremely rare: based on the data we've collected over the last six years of making puzzles, the incidence of missing pieces (or any other QA issues) is about 0.05%.

In the future, we hope to produce more Tasty Puzzles and make them available in retail stores and other places, but right now we're focused on this pre-order!

Right now, Tasty Puzzles are only available right here on our website, directly from us. Once Tasty Puzzles are delivered to our warehouse, our priority will be to ship all the pre-orders before puzzles show up anywhere else.

TLDR: Yes! That’s our goal with this pre-order.

Back in 2020, after Magic Puzzles launched on Kickstarter, we instantly got a lot of demand from retailers, and we were able to distribute some puzzles from that first print run to stores around the U.S. Our goal was for every backer got their order before MPC puzzles were available in stores, and we did pretty well: over 95% of Magic Puzzles backers got their puzzles before they were available elsewhere. But there were four issues that led to a few backers receiving their orders later:

1). Some US Target stores put puzzles on the shelves well in advance of our agreed-upon shelf date (while some puzzles going to backers were still in the mail). We made Target aware, and they removed those puzzles from shelves until the official release date.

2). Brexit happened during our shipping process. While we planned in advance for all the new procedures, our puzzles for EU backers ended up getting stuck on a boat docked off the coast of the UK for over a month. We did everything possible to make up that time, but ultimately orders going to Europe shipped later than we hoped.

3). COVID. We shipped everyone their Magic Puzzles during the 2020 lockdown, and every mail service had delays. We saw about 3-5% of orders get stuck in various stages of processing. So, a few backers were still waiting for a lost or delayed package when Magic Puzzles started appearing in stores. We worked with those backers to find their packages with the mail carrier, reship orders at our own expense, or even offer refunds.

4). The biggest issue was that many backers simply didn't provide their shipping information in time! About 60,000 people backed the Magic Puzzles Kickstarter project, and most of our backers responded to the survey within a few weeks (and those backers generally received their puzzles on time). Everyone else got their puzzles as soon as they responded to the survey. Believe it or not, our backer surveys went out in mid 2020, but we’re still getting responses to this day!