The Meetings:
We get together twice a month, alternating between two locations:
- Tualatin – Our original location. Meets at the Winona Grange Hall in Tualatin (the Tualatin schedule rotates among third Sundays, third Mondays, and third Fridays to accommodate the most people — see When and Where page for schedule.)
- NE Portland – Our newest location. Meets at the Matt Dishman Community Center in NE Portland on the first Saturday of the month from 11 am – 1 pm. (with the exception of September which gets bumped to the second Saturday — see When and Where page for schedule)
Feel free to participate at either (or both) locations. You are more than welcome to check out puzzles at one location and return them at another.
What Are the Meetings Like:
We are very informal. And while puzzles are obviously the thing that brought us all together, we have a grand time visiting with our friends, old and new alike. We don’t work puzzles at the meetings; we just swap puzzles.
How Does Trading Work:
The Exchanges are pretty simple.
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- Drop off “First-time puzzles” at the front table to allow our hosts and volunteers to check them in. First-time puzzles are those which have never been to a Portland Puzzle Exchange before. Check-in means we put a label on the bottom of the box, bag up puzzles with loose pieces, then set them out on the trading tables.
- “Returning puzzles” can be dropped off directly onto any of the trading tables. Returning puzzles are those with pieces in ziploc-style bags, log sheets in the box, and Portland Puzzle Exchange stickers on the bottom of the box.
Now you can wander! Take as many puzzles as you like. There’s no rule about how many you can take or how many you have to bring AND there’s no time limit on how long you can keep them (if you’re attached to one — keep it forever!) You’ll find a wide variety of puzzles on the tables — all sizes, piece counts, shapes, styles, and degrees of difficulty.
There will be puzzles set out when you get there, but people are constantly coming in with more, so it pays to stick around a while.
Preventing Escapees:
We found that the more we move puzzles around, coming to and from meetings, the more pieces we seem to have escaping from their boxes. The solution we all agreed upon is to use ziplock-style baggies. When you are ready to put the puzzle back in the box, put the pieces into a ziplock bag first, then in the box. The gallon size easily holds the pieces for most puzzles, and the investment of about a dime per puzzle significantly increases the life of a puzzle.
Missing Pieces? Most people don’t like to work puzzles with missing pieces, and we already have soooo many puzzles to store, that we have decided to ask that if you work a puzzle and discover that it has missing pieces please do not bring it in for exchange. We used to maintain an Orphanage for found pieces, but it had very limited success in re-uniting pieces with their puzzles, so we abandoned it.
Puzzle Tracking Sheets
We have developed a puzzle history sheet that we include in the box with each puzzle. As each person completes a given puzzle, they can date it, give the state of the puzzle (intact, missing pieces, etc.) and add any comments they want to share about that puzzle. It’s Puzzle Feedback, and is appreciated by many of us.
If a Puzzle Tracking Sheet is not in your puzzle box and your would like to add one, you can open and print at home via this link:
Puzzle Tracking Sheet Download Link
Donations:
Currently, we ask for a $10 annual donation per household to cover the meeting rental, storage, and miscellaneous supplies. Some may find the added expense more of a burden than others, and may opt to contribute a little each time they attend a meeting. We don’t keep records on who gives how much and when, only whether we have enough to pay the rent. We use the honor system; whatever you want to contribute, we will honor. The Donation Can will be out at the meetings.
How Many Puzzles Do We Have?
We’ve never attempted to count them. We have enough to cover a roomful of large tables with puzzles stacked 2 or 3 deep, and still have the other 2/3rds or 3/4ths of the puzzles in storage. We rotate the puzzles we bring out each month.
The Email List:
We maintain an “anonymous” email distribution list for sending out meeting reminders and group up-dates. There are currently over 600 of us on the list, and we have decided to use an “Undisclosed Recipients” mode of messaging in order to further protect your privacy. We don’t share or disclose our email list with anyone else, as we value your privacy as highly as we do our own. If you ever wish to be removed from the mailing list, please drop us a note at info@portlandpuzzles.org or reply to one of our meeting reminder messages.
If you have signed up for the mailing list in person at an exchange and notice you are not recieving our mailings, please send us a note at info@portlandpuzzles.org and we’ll get you on the list. It’s a little tricky transcribing handwritten sign-ups and we don’t always get it right.