Relief puzzle maps
Maps you can
take apart.
Every piece is a real place, printed at the height it actually is. Run a finger across the Alps and you feel the Alps. Lift out the Ohio and you are holding every square kilometre of ground whose rain ends up in that river.
- Puzzles
- 28
- Pieces cut
- 549
- Plate
- B5, 250 × 176 mm
The World — 7 pieces, 1 mm ≈ 157 km
Not a picture of a map. The map.
These are cut from real data — public elevation models, real hydrology, real borders — and printed as a solid object. Nothing on a plate is drawn by hand, which is why what a child learns from it is true.
Real elevation
Surface height comes from public digital elevation models, vertically exaggerated by a known factor so the relief is readable at desk size. Mountains are where mountains are, and as high as they are relative to each other.
Real water
Rivers and lakes are printed in blue from hydrological datasets, not sketched in. On the watershed puzzles the main stem is carved into the surface, so the assembled plate has the river physically running through it.
Real snow
The white on the high ground is snow-persistence data — where snow actually lies, not an altitude threshold. It is why the Alps and the Himalaya look different from each other.
Start here
4 plates that show what the collection is for.
The World
Seven continents in one ocean
The whole planet on a B5 plate. Seven pieces lift out of a single sheet of ocean.
- Pieces
- 7 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 157 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 3 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00
North America by River
A continent divided only by where water goes
No countries, no states. Twenty-nine pieces, each one the whole territory that drains into a single river.
- Pieces
- 29 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00
Europe
Forty-five countries at real elevation
The political map, printed on the terrain it was drawn over. Forty-five pieces, from Andorra to Russia's western edge.
- Pieces
- 45 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 24.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 6 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00
Switzerland
Twenty-three cantons over the Alps
The cantons, printed at 1 mm to 1.5 km, with the Alps in white and every major lake in blue.
- Pieces
- 23 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 1.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 6 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00
Zoom in
6 levels deep, and every one is a real map.
Ending in one Appalachian valley in western North Carolina.
A watershed is all the land whose rain ends up in the same river. Every cut follows a ridge, so each piece is one tributary's whole territory — and the piece you lift out of one plate is the subject of the next. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so the detail is real at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.
What it follows
Where it ends
A continent to one creek, cut by ridge lines with no borders
World to continent to country to state to township
The Rhine down to the river that runs through Zürich
World to continent to country to canton to city district
The same descent, anywhere you like
None of these is special — they are simply the ones worked through so far. A descent can be built for wherever you actually live: your country, your canton, your catchment, ending on the valley outside the classroom window. Each level takes its own round of work — deciding what the pieces should be, finding boundary data honest enough to cut from, tuning the relief until it reads at that scale — but it is work we know how to do. Tell us the place and what you want the pieces to be, and it becomes a set.
Every set comes with one
A rack built to the size of your order.
Plates slide in short-side first and rest on their own pair of rails, like trays in a canteen — so a child can take one out and put it back without disturbing the others. The rack is not a stock item with a fixed capacity: it is cut for the number of plates you order, so four and 18 each get a box that is exactly the right height, with no empty slots.
4 puzzles
261 × 185 × 69 mm
3 rail pairs — the bottom plate rests on the floor, so it needs one fewer than you might expect.
11 puzzles
261 × 185 × 181 mm
10 rail pairs — the bottom plate rests on the floor, so it needs one fewer than you might expect.
18 puzzlesthe most one rack holds
261 × 185 × 294 mm
17 rail pairs — the bottom plate rests on the floor, so it needs one fewer than you might expect.
The lid is the world
The top panel is engraved with the same Mollweide map the World puzzle is cut from — the identical file, so the box and the plate inside it agree. North points at the back, so it reads correctly when you look down at it from the front.
Cut and built here
Laser-cut from 4 mm plywood in the workshop and assembled before it ships. Every joint is a finger joint and the rails are through-tenons that pass out through the side panels — the small marks along the side are where they come through. A little glue goes in where it earns its place.
18 plates to a rack
The ceiling is the laser, not the design: a side panel has to fit the 300 mm bed, which puts 18 plates in one box. A larger set arrives as more than one rack — the collection is 28 puzzles, so a complete set is two.
The paper half
A booklet for the set, printed to match it.
A5, landscape, saddle-stitched — the same proportion as the plate, so the map fills the page it is printed on. Every piece is numbered against a key, so a child can name what they are holding, and the numbers in it are read from the same run the printer was handed rather than typed. CHF 50.00 with a set.
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Scroll over it to turn the pages. It is 12 pages; this is what it looks like, not what it says.
The Switzerland booklet: 12 pages, A5 landscape, saddle-stitched. The booklet is a printed object; its contents are described in the panels below.
Every piece has a number
The plate is drawn from the cut geometry with each piece numbered against a key — which is the difference between a child recognising a shape and being able to say its name.
How to read a relief map
What the four colours mean, what the exaggeration factor is doing, how to read a scale — then a glossary, and eight things to do with a plate that need nothing else on the table.
One booklet, or one for the set
A booklet can cover a single plate, a whole catalogue series, or a descent — in which case it carries the whole route, level by level, and the pages compare them side by side.
A material, not a toy
Montessori geography starts with puzzle maps for a reason: a child who has held Africa forty times knows its shape in a way that no wall poster achieves. The knob is replaced by the piece itself here — the relief gives every piece a grip and a texture, so the hand has something to learn as well as the eye.
These plates are built to be self-correcting in the same way. Pieces only seat one way, ridges line up with ridges, and a river that runs across a seam has to meet itself on the other side. A child does not need an adult to say whether it is right.
And because the terrain is real, the questions a plate provokes have answers. Why is this border straight and that one wiggly? Why is everyone living on this strip? Where does the water in our river come from? Those are the good questions, and the object contains the evidence.
Want a map of somewhere that isn’t here yet?
Every plate in the collection started as somebody wanting a particular place. If the one your school, town or family cares about is not here yet, that is a conversation worth having rather than a door that is closed.