The author examines the therapeutic value of puzzles for adults during two major crises in the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. Each period saw a huge surge in jigsaw puzzling throughout the country, she finds, and in both cases people turned to home-based leisure activities, either for financial reasons or because of lockdowns. Contemporary accounts from the two periods form the basis for the discussion. In both cases, the surge in puzzling reflected both the demand by consumers and the relatively easy entry of new small-scale producers into this area of playthings. Advertising played a major role, too, via premiums given to purchasers of consumer products in the 1930s, and more recently through social media and the Internet.