The Complete Guide to HEYE Puzzles

Stand in front of a wall of puzzles and one box will not be a rectangle. That is HEYE, and the triangle is the most successful piece of packaging design in the category, because it does the one thing packaging is supposed to do: it makes you pick it up.

A magazine publisher that met a cartoonist

1962. Friedrich Wilhelm Heye founds Heye Verlag in Bavaria. It is a publishing house, and its early work is magazines, including the BMW Journal. Nothing about it suggests puzzles.

1964. The company produces its first calendar, a humorous one, given away as a promotional gift. This is the hinge. Heye discovers it is good at funny pictures, and that funny pictures sell.

1972. Heye signs Guillermo Mordillo, the Argentine cartoonist, as its first cartoon artist. Mordillo drew wordless, brilliantly coloured, absurdly overcrowded scenes populated by tiny round-nosed people: a golf course with four hundred golfers, a football match in total disarray. He became internationally famous, and he became the face of the brand.

1974. The earliest HEYE puzzles anyone can trace. At least eighteen of them, already in triangular boxes. Ten were by Jean-Jacques Loup, nine by Mordillo. Both artists were still being published by HEYE decades later.

That is the whole company in four dates: a publisher that found humour, found artists, and put them in a box shaped like nothing else.

The triangular box

It is worth being honest about this, because it is genuinely divisive.

In its favour: it is unmistakable. On a shelf of two hundred rectangles, the triangle is the one your eye goes to. Fifty years on, it remains the single most recognisable packaging in puzzling, and it costs HEYE more to produce than a normal box would. That is a real commitment to a design decision.

Against it: triangular boxes do not stack. If you own thirty puzzles and store them in a cupboard, HEYE is the one that will not sit neatly with the others.

Neither of those is a reason to buy or avoid the puzzle inside. But if the person you are buying for has a very tidy puzzle shelf, consider yourself warned.

Why the range is organised by artist

Most brands organise by subject: landscapes, animals, cities. HEYE organises by illustrator, and once you know that, the catalogue becomes navigable.

You are not buying "a cat puzzle". You are buying a Jolly Pets, or a Ryba, or an Inner Mystic, and each is a consistent visual world by a consistent hand. If you liked one, the reliable move is to buy another from the same series rather than another puzzle of the same subject.

This is the same principle that makes Gibsons worth shopping by artist, but HEYE takes it further: the artist is effectively the product name.

The series worth knowing

Start with Inner Mystic if you have never done a HEYE. It is the series that best represents where the brand is now, and it does not require you to enjoy cartoons.

Cartoon Classics is the heritage, and the 2000 piece editions are the closest thing HEYE has to a flagship. They are also a commitment. See the next section.

Harder than they look

A HEYE cartoon puzzle is a trap for the unwary, in the most enjoyable way.

The artwork is crowded with hundreds of small figures, which sounds like it would make the puzzle easy, since detail is usually your friend. But between those figures sit large flat areas of a single bright colour: an unbroken green fairway, a block of sky, an expanse of sea. That combination, dense detail next to featureless colour, is among the slowest things to build, and a 2000 piece Cartoon Classic will occupy a table for a long time.

The decorative series such as Inner Mystic and Magic Forest are much more conventional in difficulty.

Who it suits

Common questions