Here's a riddle:

What can you have for a small price that you play with for a while and then sit and look at it for hours?

Here's some hints:

It may cause high levels of exasperation until you either throw it away or let someone else use it and every household has at least one.

Think about it a little more.

And here's the answer:

A puzzle.

The concept of grownups playing with puzzles may seem inane, but not to a small group of professors and students from the Boston area. Recently, a couple of collectors joined the enclave in Dudley's Lehman Hall for the first annual "Puzzle Party," where they munched cookies and lemonade while playing mind games with one another. Literally.

In town for the opening of a touring puzzle exhibition at the MIT museum, the collectors added an air of professionalism to an otherwise casual event. The collectors arrived with a few puzzles of their own, imported from their massive stores of puzzles. Featured among the games were Rubik's Cubes, Chinese folding boxes, Indian peg games and other mind twisters from around the world.

The puzzle party was the brainchild of Jack Gray, a teaching fellow for VES 176, "Synergetics," a course on concepts in three-dimensional forms. "I heard through people on the West Coast that they had puzzle parties out there," says Gray. "So I thought, `Gee, wouldn't it be fun if we had one here?'"

Gray held a test party at his home before he hosted the one at Dudley House.

Much to Gray's surprise, however, East Coast puzzle solvers have a different style from those on the West Coast. Here, Gray relates, participants sit quietly and work on the puzzles, while on the West Coast, a puzzle party can turn into a rowdier affair.

"A friend called up on the phone and asked, `Where's the noise?'" Gray says. "A few drank beer but that was okay; they couldn't solve the puzzles."

The Lehman Hall gathering, held in the main dining hall, was also subdued. Like the party at Gray's house, students and faculty from many academic disciplines sat around tables and quietly fiddled with the puzzles they brought with them.

Gray says one of the reasons the party was held in Lehman Hall was that the head instructor of VES 176, Senior Lecturer on VES Arthur L. Loeb, is also the Master of Dudley House.