Our Puzzle Designers | Creative Crafthouse

Most wooden puzzle companies do one of two things. Either they invent everything in-house and never credit anyone else, or they quietly reproduce other people's designs without naming the designer. We do both. With names attached.

Some of our puzzles are designed by Dave Janelle, our founder, and by his sons Pete and Phil. Some are designed by members of our Hudson, Florida workshop team. The rest are designs by recreational-math legends and independent puzzle designers we have direct permission from.

The reason we can name those designers is that Dave asked them. Many of those permissions came through personal relationships built over decades. That is not something most puzzle companies bother to do, and it is the reason a Calibron 12 or a Stewart Coffin design from our shop carries its real provenance, not a generic "wooden brain teaser" label.

Our family workshop (Hudson, Florida)

We are a four-generation operating family at the workshop, plus a small team in Hudson, Florida who run the lasers, the CNC, the assembly bench, and the finish room. Five of us design puzzles in addition to running the shop.

Dave Janelle, founder

Dave founded Creative Crafthouse in 2003 in Hudson, Florida, and still designs new puzzles for the workshop today. He invented the Penny Drop game in 2015 (which is our trademarked franchise) and continues to bring historical and mathematical puzzles back into production. The Calibron 12, the Stomachion, and Nine Men's Morris all came back into modern wooden form because Dave wanted them to.

Dave is the reason we can name Martin Gardner and Stewart Coffin on this catalog. The permissions came from him asking, decades ago. That kind of permission does not get granted often.

Dave-designed puzzles include: Penny Drop, Safecracker 50, the Janelle Cipher Wheel, Dime Dilemma, the Enigma cipher series, and the Crafthouse reproductions of Calibron 12, Stomachion, and Nine Men's Morris.

Pete Janelle, operations and CNC

Pete runs day-to-day operations at the workshop and is the person at the CNC machine. He will tell you that tight tolerances are not glamorous, but pick up one of our puzzles next to a mass-produced one and the difference is felt before it can be named.

Pete also designs puzzles. Four of his designs are in the 2026 catalog.

Pete-designed puzzles include: the Einstone and the Einstone II Puzzle (the two-puzzle Einstein-tile entry in the Impossible Puzzle Series), the Day and Month Puzzle, and the Wheel of Fauna.

Phil Janelle, creatives

Phil handles the creative side at the workshop: the website, the email, the gift guide, the photography. He is a recovering accountant. He has also designed hundreds of escape room puzzles for his separate company, Creative Escape Rooms, and is, by his own admission, still terrible at escape rooms.

If you have ever emailed puzzles@creativecrafthouse.com, Phil is the person at the other end.

Phil-designed puzzle: Royal Flush Maple Wood Puzzle.

Justin, lasers and personalization

Justin runs the laser machines and handles most of the personalization and engraving work at the workshop. He is at the Trotec laser cutter every day. If you ordered an engraved puzzle as a gift, Justin probably did it.

Justin-designed puzzle: Puzzle Player One (Picture Frame series, video-game themed).

Bob Nolet, former workshop, designs still in production

Bob was a Creative Crafthouse workshop designer for years. He moved on, but his puzzle box designs are still produced in our Hudson, Florida workshop today. The Secret Stash family and the Secret Lock Box II family are his.

Nolet-designed puzzles include: Secret Stash Cherry Wood Puzzle Box, Secret Lock Box II Walnut, Secret Lock Box II Mahogany, and Secret Lock Box II Cherry.

External designers we produce with permission

These are independent puzzle designers whose work we produce with their direct permission. Each gave Dave permission personally. The permission language stays accurate: with permission. Not "under license," not "authorized," not "in partnership." With permission, because that is what it is.

Stewart Coffin

Stewart Coffin is an American puzzle designer. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (class of 1953) and worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 1953 to 1958 building computers. In 1964 he left electronics to build canoes. In 1968 he started designing puzzles. Over the next five decades he designed more than 500 original polyhedral interlocking puzzles.

Coffin won the Sam Loyd Award in 2000 and the Nob Yoshigahara Award in 2006 for lifetime contribution to mechanical puzzle design. Ars Technica calls him "one of the best designers of polyhedral interlocking puzzles in the world." He is the author of Geometric Puzzle Design.

We produce his designs with his permission. There are twelve in our Stewart Coffin collection.

Browse: Stewart Coffin puzzles at Creative Crafthouse.

Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner (1914 to 2010) wrote the "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American for twenty-five years, from 1956 to 1981. Over a publishing career that spanned eighty years he wrote or edited more than one hundred books. He had no formal mathematical training (he majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago in the mid-1930s) but he is the reason most adult Americans alive today were exposed to recreational mathematics at all.

His father, a geologist, introduced him to the puzzles of Sam Loyd and Henry Dudeney as a child. He never stopped working in the field.

We produce Gardner-derived puzzles with permission.

Browse a confirmed Gardner-derived design: No Connection Wood Brain Teaser.

Bill Cutler

Bill Cutler is an American mathematician and systems analyst in Illinois. His computer analysis of the six-piece burr was published by Martin Gardner in the "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American, which re-ignited collector interest in the puzzle in the late 1970s. In 1985 Cutler found a level-5 burr, and in 1990 he completed the analysis that proved the highest possible level using notchable pieces is 5, with exactly 139 such puzzles existing.

That is the kind of provenance a mass-produced burr puzzle simply does not have. We produce Cutler's burr designs with his permission.

Ken Irvine

Ken Irvine collected mechanical puzzles for more than four decades before designing his own. His first design, "The Nagging Wife," was inspired by his wife insisting that he stop collecting and start creating. He has since designed the Push Button Burr, the Pink Ivory Ring, the Penultimate Burr Box Set (co-designed with Van Delft and Botermans), and Broken Soma, a six-piece variant of the classic Soma cube with a single assembly.

We produce his designs with permission.

George Sicherman

George Sicherman is a retired computer programmer originally from Buffalo, now living in New Jersey. He studies recreational mathematics with the help of his programming. In 1977 he invented Sicherman dice: a pair of dice with non-standard faces (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 on one and 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4 on the other) that produces the same probability distribution as a pair of standard dice. In 2019 he won Kadon Enterprises' Polyomino Excellence Award for Shardinaires-9, a nine-piece dissection puzzle that forms all twelve pentomino shapes and all five tetrominoes.

We produce his designs with permission.

Vesa Timonen

Vesa Timonen is a Finnish software engineer who designs mechanical puzzles in his spare time. He started designing because he could not find puzzles he wanted on store shelves. His designs are known for looking simple and turning out to be fiendishly difficult. Multiple Timonen designs are in the Hanayama Cast series. His Lox in Box packing-puzzle line is a collector favorite.

We produce his designs with permission.

Jennifer Haselgrove

Jennifer Haselgrove is a British puzzle inventor. She designed the Haselgrove Box, a wooden puzzle modeled on the locking mechanisms used in Ancient Egyptian pyramids. The puzzle is solved blind: the workings are inside a closed wooden box, and the solver listens to the sound of internal blocks moving to figure out the sequence. When the box opens, the larger interior piece viewed sideways forms the letter "J" and the top face forms an "H." Those are Jennifer Haselgrove's initials.

Browse: Haselgrove Box, the Ancient Egyptian Puzzle Lock.

Sherzod Khaydarbekov

Sherzod Khaydarbekov is a puzzle designer based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, who specializes in chess-based logic puzzles. His designs ask you to move a chess piece to a target square using only standard chess moves, with the puzzle's difficulty hidden in how the pieces and squares are arranged.

Browse a Khaydarbekov-designed puzzle in our catalog: Throne the King Chess Puzzle.

Historical reproductions

A few of the most important wooden puzzles in history have no living designer to ask. For those, we work from the historical record and produce a faithful modern wooden version.

Theodore Edison and the Calibron 12 (1933)

Theodore Edison was the youngest son of Thomas Edison. He earned a physics degree from MIT in 1923 (he was the only member of the Edison family to graduate from college) and earned more than eighty patents of his own during his career. He founded Calibron Industries in West Orange, New Jersey, and built his own laboratory there.

In 1933 he designed the Calibron 12 puzzle: twelve precision-cut blocks that have to be packed into a single rectangular frame. The original run was fewer than 200 copies, made in Bakelite (the first synthetic plastic) as a promotional piece for Calibron Industries. The puzzle has a single solution and is notoriously hard.

We faithfully reproduce it in solid hardwood in our Hudson, Florida workshop.

Browse: Calibron 12 at Creative Crafthouse.

Archimedes and the Stomachion

The Stomachion is the oldest puzzle in the historical record. It is described in fragmentary manuscripts attributed to Archimedes and referenced again by Magnus Ausonius (310 to 395 AD). Fourteen pieces, originally arranged in a square. Archimedes' interest was mathematical: how many distinct ways could the pieces be rearranged into the original square? The question went unanswered for more than two thousand years.

In November 2003, Bill Cutler (whose work we also produce) computed the answer: 536 distinct arrangements, treating reflections and rotations as identical.

We produce the modern wooden version of the Stomachion. The historical attribution is to Archimedes; the modern producer is us.

Browse: Stomachion puzzle at Creative Crafthouse.

Nine Men's Morris

Nine Men's Morris is an ancient strategy game with Roman archaeological evidence and likely older roots. Public domain. We produce the modern wooden edition.

Browse: Nine Men's Morris at Creative Crafthouse.

How we attribute

A wooden puzzle is only as good as the person who designed it. So we put the name on it.

Three rules govern how we credit designers on our catalog:

Living independent designers we produce for, we credit by name and frame as "with permission." Not "under license," not "authorized," not "in partnership." With permission, because that is what the relationship is.
Historical designers whose work is in the public domain, we credit by name and frame as "faithful reproduction" or "modern producer." Theodore Edison designed the Calibron 12; we make the modern wooden version. Archimedes described the Stomachion; we make the modern wooden version.
Our own family and workshop team designs, we credit on the specific puzzle. Dave designed the Penny Drop. Phil designed the Royal Flush. Pete designed the Einstone series. Bob Nolet designed the Secret Stash family. Justin designed the Puzzle Player One. Each design carries its actual designer's name, not a default name across the catalog.

The reason we do this is not legal. It is the right thing. A puzzle designer who poured a decade into a new mechanism deserves the credit on the puzzle's tag. So does Theodore Edison, who has been dead since 1992. So does Archimedes.