Sharpen your brain at this new lounge space

Whenever Senthilnathan, a former banker, and his wife Subhatra had to accompany their four-year-old daughter to activity centres for kids, the duo had to find ways to spend their time. Mostly, their smartphones came as a saviour but it didn’t go a long way. They started brainstorming and decided to create a space that can be utilised by both adults and kids. That’s how Untangle, Chennai’s first puzzle-solving lounge, was opened in Teynampet.

“It’s a place for grownups (and also for kids) to spend their free time engaging in activities away from gadgets and sharpening their brains. We’re calling it a gym for the brain. You can come alone or as a group of friends, family and colleagues. People from different walks of life can also bond at Untangle,” says Senthilnathan, the co-founder.It’s been a month since Untangle started its service and Senthilnathan says that the response has been overwhelming.

“We have customers from different age groups. People can select from our three options. First is the jigsaw puzzle and we have got a huge collection ranging from 300-piece to 3,000-piece ones. One can either solve them in full or solve for a while and pass the baton on to the next visitor. We call it the Jigsaw Puzzle Relay. Second is the ‘sit and solve’ puzzles. Each of the puzzles has a different objective and comes with instruction booklets — colour-coded by category and star-coded by difficulty. Since there are multiple difficulty levels, one will take around 10 minutes to solve this. The third option is board games — it’s not the random luck-based games that you would have played before but the ones you need to depend on strategising,” shares the former banker.

He also noticed that people plan their visit for an hour but have stayed for three hours and didn’t want to leave. They have collected puzzles from around the world so that the concept of solving puzzles gets interesting. “Playing and solving puzzles on a regular basis have many benefits on adults. It allows them to improve cognitive skills, memory, concentration, and problem-solving. Also, this is a great stress-busting activity,” Senthilnathan tells us.