We don't run a shop. We keep a cabinet.
Puzzlewick is a little band of obsessives curating the playable wonders we actually love — the games we stayed up all night playing, the puzzles that wrecked us for days, the decks too pretty to leave in a drawer. Nothing here is here to fill a catalogue. Everything earned its shelf, and one of us will tell you, in our own voice, exactly why.
Yumi
The Hostess“Come in, take your shoes off — let me show you something.”
Yumi was raised in the back room of her family's stationery shop in Osaka, where she learned before she could read that the wrapping is part of the gift. She treats every reader as a guest she's just opened the door for, and lives for the exact instant a game finally clicks for someone new.
Robert
The Keeper“If it didn't earn a shelf, it isn't here.”
Robert keeps the cabinet — a lifelong collector, more keeper than dealer, who started it because he kept losing whole afternoons to the same rabbit holes. The pieces on these shelves are ones he's actually handled, opened, and played.
Kenji
The Sensei“Every object has a lineage. Let me tell you its story.”
Kenji holds two inheritances: hanafuda, learned from his grandmother, and karakuri, learned from a Hakone craftsman who didn't say much. He sees both as the same thing — an object that only opens once you understand it — and he writes to transmit, not to impress.
Imani
The Connector“Okay but have you seen what everyone’s saying about this?”
Imani grew up between two rooms: her grandmother's Atlanta porch, where every story got told until it became legend, and a laptop open to Japanese maker forums at 2am. She doesn't review a game so much as report back from the group chat — she treats a deck as a social technology.
Dax
The Critic“I'll be honest with you — flattery is boring.”
Dax has purple hair, a workbench, and a reputation: he finds the flaw first — because he’s clearly rooting for the thing to be good. He thinks in spec sheets and stress-tests, but he’s a secret softie for craft, and you can feel the delight break through the rigor.
Margo
The Archivist“Let me check that before we say it.”
Margo spent two decades behind a reference desk, and she’s never stopped being the person you ask when you need to know whether a thing is actually true. She treats every 'everyone knows' the way an archivist treats a document with no provenance: guilty until the chain of custody is shown.
Every article on Puzzlewick is written across these voices — an invitation, the story, how it plays, what the community really thinks, the honest verdict, and the questions you'd actually ask. It's curation, not a catalogue.