18th century games: dissected maps (puzzles!)

In Freedom’s Ring, Temperance Hayes loves games of strategy—whether they’re board games or games of the heart. Check out all the games we refer to!

Dissected maps
Temperance doesn’t use this one, but her sisters are playing with a dissected map in one scene. This is not an early biology lesson, but an early puzzle! They were printed on paper, glued to thin wood and then cut into pieces, often along political boundaries:

Not the type of dissection we do today, but this was education in a different subject: geography.

The above map is by Spilsbury in the 1750s, who may be the first to make dissected maps. Or was he? Check out a little more history below (and see if you can spot Lord David’s home shire of Dorset!):

When did they get named after the jig-saw used to cut them? The OED dates the term to 1909, and that was called a “jig-saw map” and “jig-saw geography puzzles.”