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The World Puzzle Center was founded by George and Roxanne Miller, two people crazy about puzzles. After a combined 120 years of collecting puzzles and amassing the world's largest manipulative puzzle collection, they decided to form the World Puzzle Center to open their collection to puzzlers from around the world.

George's puzzle journey started with collecting and making his own Burr puzzles. He expanded to other types of puzzles, experimenting in his home in California with different materials and techniques to make puzzles, then trading his puzzles for new puzzles for his collection. He hand made hundreds of puzzles each year and started a puzzle company "Puzzle Palace" to sell his puzzles. He offered his prototyping services to other puzzle designers and gained a reputation in the puzzle community for his puzzle prototyping abilities. These collaborations helped build his collection even more. The laser cutter was his main machine for prototyping and making puzzles, but he envisioned how much more could be done with a 3D printer. He gave talks about his vision and purchased a commercial 3D printer. He was the first person to 3D print puzzles for the puzzle community, and it greatly expanded his collection. He called his 3D printer Santa Clause because he would send it a print job and go to sleep then wake up in the morning to a new puzzle, like a gift from Santa.

Roxanne has been collecting puzzles since she was a young girl. When she was in Germany in her late teens she amassed a large number of Rubik's Cubes and other mechanical puzzles. After moving to Hong Kong in her 20's, she became serious about collecting puzzles having close contact to the many puzzle designers and manufactures in China. She attended the Hong Kong Toys & Games Fair for 25 years and started documenting her puzzle collecting journey on her blog in 2010. During her time in Asia she was able to grow her collection to nearly 20,000 puzzles. When her collection joined with George's in 2018, her small apartment in Hong Kong could no longer hold all of the puzzles. The solution George and Roxanne came up with to their problem of too many puzzles was to move to a large house in Florida where they were able to display their combined collection of over 30,000 puzzles.  

In 2021, soon after installing shelves and putting each of their own puzzles on display, George discovered that The Puzzle Museum, which housed the Hordern-Dalgety collection of over 40,000 mechanical puzzles, had been looking for a new home for over 20 years. It was an opportunity George and Roxanne could not pass up. They offered to be the new home for The Puzzle Museum puzzle collections. With an influx of puzzles nearly double the size of their original collection, George and Roxanne had too many puzzles to fit in their large home in Florida. Yet again dealing with this problem, the solution they came up with was to buy another large house nearby to display the combined collections of puzzles between the two houses.

As the years passed the collection kept growing even after all the shelves installed in both houses became full. Again dealing with the familiar problem of too many puzzles, a solution came to George and Roxanne in 2022 on a fateful world cruise. They were visiting a museum of Etruscan sarcophagi in a beautiful castle in Italy. After seeing room after room of large stone coffins George remarked to Roxanne that the coffins were boring, but the rooms were large and plentiful. "We could display all of our puzzles here, and more!" Roxanne googled "castles for sale in Italy" and soon found one that seemed perfect. Before their cruise ended they had purchased a large castle in a beautiful ancient town in the heart of Umbria to display their entire puzzle collection and keep collecting new puzzles. They have since received 8 more collections. As of the summer of 2025, their collection has approximately 120,000 unique manipulative puzzles and their library holds a collection of 15,000 books related to puzzles, recreational mathematics, and magic.