Meet the Nintendo 3DS Fans Hoping to Finally ‘Beat’ Puzzle Swap By Tracking Down its Rarest Puzzle

I vividly remember from young adulthood the thrill of pulling my 3DS out of my bag at the end of the day and seeing the familiar blinking light indicating I’d received a StreetPass while I was out and about. I’d open the app and see the Miis of the different people I’d passed that day, with cute messages and silly hats. And every time, I’d immediately open Puzzle Swap to see what puzzle pieces they had given me.

When I first started Puzzle Swap, I entertained delusions that I might someday complete every puzzle just by passing fellow 3DS owners on the street. I quickly learned this was a nigh-impossible fantasy for a number of reasons, one of which being that several of the available puzzles couldn’t even be unlocked unless I traveled across the globe for special, limited-time events where unique puzzles were being handed out. I settled for trying to finish the various Mario, Kirby, and Zelda-themed puzzles that came by default on the device, or through occasional online updates. Admittedly, I never managed that either.

Now, my 3DS is gathering dust in a cabinet somewhere, its online services having been permanently shut down earlier this year and my motivation to use it having long since dried up. But a dedicated group of fans are still trying to realize the dream of collecting every Puzzle Swap puzzle, and they’re doggedly working to find their white whale: ANA: the rarest puzzle of them all.

Chasing ANA

The missing puzzle is a bit of a strange one. It’s called ANAでDS, ANA for short, with ANA standing for “All Nippon Airways.” It’s a special puzzle distributed way back in 2012 from July 21 to September 30 in Japan, but only at three select airport locations: Haneda Airport Terminal 2 (Tokyo), New Chitose Airport (Hokkaido), and Naha Airport (Okinawa). What’s more, the puzzle itself cannot be passed to others via StreetPass. You can collect pieces from others who have them if you already have the puzzle unlocked, but with the event having concluded over a decade ago, there’s no “legitimate” way to acquire the puzzle if you didn’t receive it at the time. As a result, the puzzle is exceptionally rare compared to other puzzles distributed more widely, eluding many hunters over the years.

Which is where Benny and his fellow puzzle hunters come in.

Benny runs a Discord server called The Search for ANAでDS, where roughly 20 individuals have been collaborating over the last several weeks to track down the final missing puzzle. Benny tells me he became interested in finding ANA only recently, after his love for the 3DS was reignited thanks to a homebrew application called NetPass, which allows players to receive StreetPasses over the internet.

Through his interest in NetPass, Benny stumbled upon and joined the search for the Japan-exclusive マックでDS ビッグマック (a picture of a McDonald’s Big Mac), which was only just officially cataloged last month. Just before that, others in the community managed to track down another time-limited puzzle, EU-exclusive Mario & Happy. With the inclusion of both Mario & Happy and the Big Mac, 62 of Puzzle Swap’s 63 total puzzles were officially uploaded online and available for anyone to download. With just one puzzle left, Benny’s next objective was clear: ANA.

“Those puzzles were easier to recover because the required SpotPass data had already been dumped by users on the Internet; it was essentially just a matter of finding the data,” Benny explains. “In this case, it is more difficult because to the best of our knowledge, the ANAでDS puzzle data has not been publicly dumped anywhere, so we have to search for someone who has the puzzle so we can recover the required data from them directly”

What Benny and his fellow hunters need to document ANA is simple on its face: they just have to find one individual who has the puzzle unlocked on their 3DS who is willing to upload a file from their SD card to the internet. That’s it! No homebrew or modding required, and the individual doesn’t even need to have the puzzle completed. Just a single piece is enough.

Since May, the group has been spreading the word to news outlets, subreddits, forums, and other communities in an effort to find ANA. Once the file is uploaded, the community will take matters from there and incorporate the puzzle into a larger file with all the other puzzles, enabling anyone who wants a complete puzzle collection and doesn’t mind a bit of homebrew to download all 63 puzzles at once.

Do you have the rarest StreetPass puzzle? ✈️

In summer 2012, Nintendo collaborated with All Nippon Airways to distribute the Puzzle Swap puzzle “ANAでDS”. Currently, this is the only lost puzzle out of the entire collection.

(a 🧵; 1/?) pic.twitter.com/XqogPwQvSD

— The Search for ANAでDS (@PuzzleSwapANA) June 25, 2024

“If someone has the puzzle, they can contact us by email at [email protected], send us a Twitter/X direct message at @PuzzleSwapANA, or join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/JTAJF3DgxY and we will guide them through completing the simple steps needed to recover the puzzle’s SpotPass data (it should only take at most 10 minutes),” Benny explains.

Puzzle Preservation

It may seem strange that a community has rallied around a game like Puzzle Swap especially after Nintendo officially discontinued online communications for the device earlier this year. While local communications are still possible, meaning StreetPass itself still works, not a lot of folks are carting 3DSes around in their bags in 2024.

But a number of those I spoke to in the community tell me that it was Nintendo’s discontinuation of services for the 3DS that motivated them to pick up the handheld device again.

“I’m personally using it about as much as my switch, but I think the shutdown motivated a lot of people (me at least) to start archiving, modding, getting replacement services (ie Pretendo), etc,” said Croton, another community member who’s been heavily involved in the hunt, “like I forget when the shutdown was announced but I only just modded on a random Tuesday in October, and when the SpotPass archival server started recovering game data I modded my family’s 4 other 3ds’s to archive more data.”

Some of those in the community are in it simply for the collect-a-thon. One community member, MrNoobingtonThelll, tells me that after the Big Mac puzzle was found some of the energy for puzzle hunting started to die down. “[T]he missing puzzles topic kinda died but Benny was one of the few one [sic] actively searching for it, so with my collectors anxiety of [100 percenting] a game I started to offer a little help.”

Others, like Ninja Squid, see the hunt as critical to game preservation. “It’s rewarding to be a part of this team and see all the amazing work we’ve done,” he said. “Finding this puzzle is important because, even if it’s a relatively unknown or niche part of the legacy of the 3ds, it still matters and is a big part of eventually archiving most of the history of the 3ds. [I]t’s a very neat novelty from an interesting time in Nintendo’s history that I would love to know is accessible to anyone. Being a part of this gives me the opportunity to help archive an important and rare piece of this amazing console’s history, and it’s nice to know that we are getting to be one big step closer to archiving as much of the 3ds as possible.”

At the time this piece is being written, the ANA hunters do have one lead – a comment on a NintendoLife article from a user claiming to have ANA on their DS. The community has reached out and is waiting for a response. In the meantime, they’re keeping their eyes open for other leads on ANA in case this one falls through. But overall, the mood is hopeful.

“[D]ude since the file for every puzzle combined is new the first person to complete ana ds would be the first to actually beat puzzle swap,” observed MrNoobingtonThelll.

He may just be right – and it only took 13 years.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].