Although the party was publicized with only a few fliers and a notice in the Dudley House newsletter, many students, art professors and a couple of collectors who were to exhibit their puzzles at the MIT museum the following day showed up.

"I don't think anyone was bored," says Gray, who hopes to eventually host more puzzle parties.

Ten Thousand Puzzles Of...

But puzzle lovers do not have to wait for the next party before finding a mecca of games. The MIT museum is currently sponsoring an exhibit of an extravaganza of puzzles. Six rooms at the museum are devoted to puzzles; they comprise a unique genre including mathematics, painting, and sculpture, as well as some psychology.

Some puzzles, though packaged in new trimmings, have been around for centuries, according to the exhibit.

The exhibit depicts a wide variety of puzzles. On display is a puzzle more sophisticated than the now-ubiquitous jigsaw puzzle, known as a "tangram." The tangram, though used in many disparate cultures, appears in more or less the same form throughout China, Japan and Europe.

The premise is different from the jigsaw puzzle, which has one and only one solution. The tangram usually comes with a booklet (or in ancient China, several volumes) which are filled with pictures that the solver creates with the seven pieces with which he or she is provided.

Included in the exhibition is an example of the more practical applications of the tangram. During World War I the popularity of this puzzle provided a manufacturer with a chance to help Allied prisoners escape; Red Cross care packages contained tangram puzzles in wooden boxes, many of which had a hacksaw, a compass, and a map concealed in a false wall of the box.

Another puzzle that the exhibit depicts the long history of is the dexterity puzzle. This very simple puzzle--with four balls in a circular maze--caused a craze in the 1880s almost on the scale of the Rubik's Cube fad a century later. The object was to put the four balls in the center of the maze, or place the "pigs" in the "pen."

Other dexterity puzzles did not require the user to manipulate steel or stone balls, but water, mercury, or capsules with lead balls inside of them.

The exhibit details the chronology of these pieces. One puzzle, made in the image of the Atlantic Ocean, challenges players to put the "planes" of Lindbergh, Byrd, and Chamberlain into "hangars" located on the other side of the ocean. The puzzle pays tribute to the real-life race as to which of the three pilots would cross the Atlantic first.

Another dexterity puzzle required a fighter plane to "shoot down" a WWI-vintage zeppelin. But if the ball fell into a hole, the fighter itself was shot down--disappearing into a hole surrounded by a picture of a fireball.

One of the more eclectic type of puzzles in the exhibition are the "appearing/disappearing object" puzzles.

The immortal "geometric money" puzzle is one of the original types of this kind of puzzle. On first glance, it looks as though if you draw a diagonal line through a three-by-ten box and rearrange the pieces, you will wind up with a 32 square-inch field instead of a 30 square-inch field.

But appearances can be deceiving. Go see for yourself.