Puzzle Pick-Up Lines
How Puzzling Can Give You Game
Written by Joyce Yoo / July 06, 2023 / Profile Photo: The most liked Pickup Lines from the Giveaway
Puzzling might have an image as a wholesome activity for quiet, mild-mannered, indoor people, but as the Puzzlegram community discovered recently, puzzling can help you get your flirt on and maybe even get a little R-rated! How, you ask?
In late May, Soon (founder of Soonness puzzles) messaged me (@joyce.puzzles) to see if I’d be interested in collaborating on a giveaway. And it was a BIG one. She’d just celebrated her birthday and wanted to give away five limited edition puzzles! Soon also loves doing creative prompts for giveaways to make them fun (and I am 100% on board with that!). Recently, she and Diane (@bizzlespuzzles) did a giveaway asking puzzlers to add a word to the title of a movie, book, song or puzzle to “ruin” it, with hilarious results.
For our giveaway, Soon and I brainstormed a few ideas and settled on puzzle related pick-up lines.
It was inspired by a brief exchange I had with Becca (@jigsawlogist) on a post for Puzzle Jam South (@puzzlejamsouth) months earlier. Before PJS had a name, they had asked puzzlers to submit suggestions. As a joke, I commented, “I Like the Cut of Your Jig” and Becca replied that it would be a great pick-up line. I guess that stuck with me and bubbled back up when we were brainstorming for the giveaway.
I thought it would be a funny prompt, but I was a little concerned it might not be the most universal, especially for anyone for whom English is a non-primary language. But at the same time, this was a major giveaway and we felt like people should work for it a little. I really wasn’t sure how many entries we would get. We wanted to give everyone a chance to participate and win, so we made it a random drawing, but also wanted to celebrate creativity and effort, so we decided to award each of our favorites with 10 bonus entries.
We could not have anticipated the response.
The creativity, the cleverness, the hilariousness, all the different angles that people took, the dirtiness - we were so blown away. We loved seeing people having so much fun coming up with lines and reading ones other people wrote. In all, we had about 125 participants write pick-up lines and 530+ comments on the post. And while I couldn’t enter the giveaway, I didn’t want to miss out on all the fun, so I shared some of my own pick-up lines as well.
The giveaway ran for five days and every day, people were submitting new entries, engaging, and sharing. After entries closed, I was riding a high as I was going through all the comments and tallying up everything to select the winner. And then…
I got locked out of Instagram.
A message popped up saying that my account had been disabled because my activity had been flagged as spammy, and that my account may have been compromised (hacked). I was freaking out. On a personal level, I didn’t want to lose all the content and followers I’d built up. In the grand scheme of things, I know it’s not a big deal, but I had put in a lot of effort and was being given some great opportunities (like this giveaway) because of what I’d built so far. On top of that, I didn’t want to let people down as so many people had participated in the giveaway and were eagerly awaiting the results.
I mean, five limited edition Soonness puzzles were at stake!
As I tried troubleshooting to get back in, I worried if I had been hacked. Or was I violating Instagram’s Community Standards with all these dirty pick-up lines? After a few hours and no luck, I emailed Soon to let her know the situation and asked her to post about the delay in announcing the winner.
A few hours of trying to find a solution turned into a day, then two days, then a third day - when I finally got back in!
I was so relieved.
I dove in and tallied the rest of the results and put them into a randomizer to pick the winner. Before we could do that, we also had to choose our favorites and give them 10 bonus entries each.
My favorite was from Dan (@puzzlephile):
Soon’s favorite was from Iulia (@iuliapuzzle):
And the winner was… Brijahn/Bree (@puzzlefandom)! Bree had submitted multiple lines and we loved seeing how much fun she had with it.
Even though we could only have one winner, we wanted to highlight the amazing lines you all came up with.
Here are some of our favorites below. Maybe you can try them out on a fellow puzzler and make them swoon - or laugh hysterically. Thanks so much to everyone who entered, warmed our hearts, and made us laugh! Puzzling is so fun to do on your own, but when the community can come together around our shared love, it truly raises the game.
The Unboxing Video from the Winner of the Giveaway!
Get to know the Author: Joyce Yoo
Joyce is a puzzle instagrammer and writer. Since she hasn’t yet figured out how to become a paid, full-time puzzler, she is working as a voice actor and career coach. She lives in Las Vegas with her Puzzle Husband with whom she has made several independent films. She believes strongly that grown ups should play, too – not just kids – and her favorite ways to incorporate play into her life are through puzzles, board games, party games, and creative expression (especially with humor infused).