This is the couple who intends to turn their home into a puzzle castle

George and Roxanne Miller are the owners of the world's largest collection of mechanical puzzles: physical objects that a person holds and manipulates while searching for a solution. The Miller collection amounts to more than 80 thousand puzzles. It includes about 5,000 Rubik's cubes and more than 7,000 wooden puzzles, including the interlocking polyhedral creations of Stewart Coffin, a Massachusetts puzzle maker. Roxanne Miller has a particular fondness for her 140 brass, bronze and gold puzzle sculptures by Spanish artist Miguel Berrocal; Goliath, a 79-piece male torso, is “a puzzle desired by all puzzle lovers,” she said.

Until recently, the Miller collection resided at Puzzle Palace in Boca Raton, Florida, occupying its mansion and a museum (a smaller house) next door. Then, in 2022, the Millers impulsively bought a 52-room 15th-century castle in Panicale, a village in central Italy. They packed their puzzle collection into five 40-foot shipping containers and, for their own transportation, booked a cruise from Miami to Rome.

The world of puzzles is populated by self-proclaimed fanatics. For example, Bret Rothstein, a historian of “playful visual and material cultures” at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the author of a book on puzzles, “The Shape of Difficulty: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects.” In it, Rothstein observes that Thomas Kuhn, historian and philosopher of science, aligned puzzle-making with scientific research. Puzzles force us to embrace error, Rothstein notes, adding that perhaps their most beautiful feature is their “continual erosion of certainty.”

“We run into problems, we solve them, that's what puzzles are all about,” Miller said. When he reopens his collection—around January 2025—it will be under the name World Puzzle Center, reflecting his biggest dream: not just a museum, but a place for parties and conferences, competitions and research; a space to design, make and play with puzzles.

The Millers met at the International Puzzle Party in 2010, married in 2018 (after parallel divorces), and merged their collections. She contributed about 20 thousand puzzles when she got married; he had a couple thousand.

Roxanne Miller, 56, received her first puzzle at age 6 — “I never stopped playing with them,” she said. In 1993, studying history and applied linguistics, she landed in Hong Kong and worked as a teacher.

George Miller, 78, began doing puzzles later in life. After a time in the circus (juggling, trapeze), he studied artificial intelligence and then had a career at Bank of America, designing currency systems. When he retired in 1997, at age 52, his enthusiasm for puzzles took a serious turn: he became the first dedicated producer of prototype puzzles. He bought a laser cutter and later a 3D printer and made an offer: anyone could submit a design and he would produce a prototype for free; in exchange, he would keep a copy.

“George was instrumental,” said Oskar van Deventer, a prolific Dutch puzzle designer; The offer to produce prototypes sparked a transformation in puzzle creation. “George helped people, like me, create a first working prototype that I was able to present to producers like Hanayama,” Van Deventer said. “Until George’s free offer, prototyping had to be done by the inventor.”

Miller saw a shift from a competitive environment, in which designers protected their inventions, to a more cooperative spirit. After giving Van Deventer a laptop with CAD (computer-aided design) software installed, he began a flood of designs arriving via email. Miller would start the printer, let it run all night, and wake up to a new puzzle, “like it was Christmas,” Miller said; He named this machine Santa Clós.

Then there's the Miller Collection's unraveling puzzle: The Lovers, a life-size replica of the couple, naked, cast in bronze, with a loop of rope tangled around their topologically baffling embrace.

“He wanted a puzzle of us,” Roxanne Miller said. “That's our favorite puzzle and no one else has it,” George Miller said.

“Nobody else would want it, right?” she said.

“It's one of a kind,” he said.

By: SIOBHAN ROBERTS