Of all the games in the world, the jigsaw puzzle has got to be among the most ubiquitous. Yet the history of its origins presents an intriguing puzzle of its own. Officially, the jigsaw puzzle 1ORIGIN in England, and its 2INVENT was John Spilsbury, a London engraver and map maker. It is also an apparently 3DISPUTE fact that in 1767 Spilsbury created a puzzle, 4INITIAL known as a ‘dissected map’, by mounting one of his maps on a piece of hardwood and cutting around the borders of the countries. His puzzles came to be used as 5EDUCATION tools in schools to help children learn Geography. However, as is almost 6VARY the case with inventions, some doubts have been raised about whether Spilsbury’s puzzle was the first, and there is evidence that two Dutch map makers, Covens and Mortier, may have produced the first puzzle ten years earlier. The controversy arises from the fact that their puzzles were first made using maps that had been printed in the 1720s. However, this was an age of exploration, and new 7DISCOVER demanded that maps be constantly 8DATE. Consequently, the maps used in the puzzles would have been out of date by 1760, suggesting that Covens and Mortier produced their first puzzles before then. The evidence is inconclusive, however, and advertising for their dissected maps only appears in 1779. So it is conceivable that they simply thought this was a good way of making use of old maps.