COLLECTION 149: Vintage Children's USA Puzzles & Games

Welcome to Toy Tuesday! There's just something about maps that I love! I especially love old maps, with their fascinating shapes, names, highways, cities...and I love maps of the USA. Maybe it's because I'm unashamedly in love with my country, just seeing these old map puzzles makes me feel proud and nostalgic.  (Click on any of the photos for a closer view)

Oregon, where art thou?

These are my collection of vintage USA puzzles, plus one map game: The Game of the States. One of these map puzzles was my own as a child, the one shown below. I'm so glad that I never lost a piece, and that I somehow managed to hang onto it all these years.

Mostly, I just put them up on a high shelf as part of my greater toy collection, and rarely explore further. When I was cleaning these off to photograph, I opened the box of the one on the bottom right side- in the orange box. I thought it would be fun to see if all the states were there, and I was surprised to find two Texas pieces! What? They were completely different, and I quickly realized I had two map puzzles! (well, mostly two, several of the states were missing, but enough to see what fun puzzles I had.) The second puzzle was quite different from the first. The older puzzle, was rather boring and ordinary, but the second one had cool late '50s or early '60s graphics with cute, stylized illustrations of sheep and cows and trains and the like.

Also included in my collection is the old Hasbro Teach-A-Toy map, which includes little flags you can put on the map with the names of capitals and other important cities.

Most of these maps were created before 1960, when the last of the two 50 states were added. But they were sometimes included because they were territories at the time, and considered part of the USA. On one map, the Philippines is included.

I hope you enjoy my little map puzzle collection!