Lydia Likes It

Custom jigsaw puzzles

My family loves jigsaw puzzles. For my husband Ted, the minimum size is 800 or 1,000 pieces, or more. I've bought him every style, every color, every pattern, but this year for the holidays, I had a custom jigsaw puzzle made by PuzzleYOU. He chose a favorite photo, one he thought would make a challenging puzzle. We uploaded it to their site, selected the number of puzzle pieces (from 48 to 2,000) he wanted, and a week later, a beautiful puzzle arrived. A great one-of-a-kind gift, and perfect for long, dark winter nights or summer vacation evenings.

Chrono

Test your knowledge of history with Chrono, a free daily online puzzle in the model of Wordle. Six moments in history, three chances to put them in chronological order. Easy, fun, and sometimes surprising.

Worldle

My husband Ted and my cousin Martin are big into Worldle, a variation of the viral online word game Wordle that started this particular craze. Wordle grew so fast that The New York Times bought it earlier this year. Worldle tests your knowledge of geography; the object of the game is to guess the country, city, or territory depicted in black. Guess once, and if you're not correct, you'll get clues that tell you how far away you are, and in which general direction you should be looking. If you like this sort of guessing game, try Nerdle, a numbers version, or Heardle, a modern iteration of Name That Tune. If you need even more of a challenge, then Absurdle might be the perfect mind-blower for you. 

Ouisi

My husband Ted loves to play games, and he plays to win, as most good game players do. Me, not so much; I lack the competitive gene. We do manage the occasional game of Scrabble, Bananagrams, Monopoly, or backgammon, and now there's a new game that meets us where we meet each other. Ouisi entertains and challenges on so many levels. There are nine different ways to play with the 210 visually stunning photo cards in each set, and that's not including toddlers who might just want to chew on them. Try Ouisi Original, or Ouisi Nature. Photographers from around the world contributed images, and the visual connections are endless. Oodles of fun for the whole family, for just $35. 

Bill Cunningham, jigsaw puzzle

Bill Cunningham, arguably the best street photographer of our time, chronicled fashion and high society for The New York Times for nearly 40 years. Anyone walking around midtown Manhattan in the vicinity of 5th Avenue and 57th Street might have spotted him on his bicycle, camera around his neck, snapping the famous, the not-famous, and the unexpectedly fabulous. Even if you weren't particularly interested in fashion (me) or fashionistas (also me), if you were a faithful New York Times reader (me again), you read Bill Cunningham and marveled at his elegant photo essays. I posted in 2014 about a documentary -- Bill Cunningham New York -- and a book of his photographs that celebrate the artist and his extraordinary life and talent. Now you can build your own Bill as a jigsaw puzzle, too. It's shaped like a bicycle and, though it's only 750 pieces, it's far more challenging than you'd imagine.