Every Puzzle I Own (and one I don’t)

Even before stay at home orders, lockdowns, and quarantines sent people scrambling for non-electronic activities that could be done from the confines of their homes, I was assembling jigsaw puzzles like a technology-shunning hermit. My current collection is curated mostly from the Friends of the Library bookstore at the library, plus a couple from a family at church, and one on loan. The loan has gone on much longer than expected. Thanks corona.

I’ve done enough puzzles that I have opinions about them, both in terms of content and manufacture. If you know me, this should be approximately zero percent surprising. Let’s begin, shall we?

[Click photos to enlarge]

We start with a puzzle of beer brands from White Mountain Puzzles. The 90s and Finger Lakes puzzles below are also manufactured by them. They also make more “traditional” style puzzles of landscapes and bucolic Americana, but I’d say they bring more to the jigsaw puzzle industry with their “collage” puzzles, whether they’re maps + highlights (Finger Lakes) or a mélange of related images (beer, 90s). Because these puzzles don’t have endless stretches of sky or 50 shades of grass, they tend to be easier than their pastoral landscape counterparts, but they’re very fun to do and would probably be good for a group who might be less enthusiastic about puzzles. Out of all my puzzles, White Mountain makes the second tightest fitting pieces, especially when new, to the point where you can pick up the entire puzzle by a corner when it’s complete. Overall an enjoyable and well-made brand of puzzles.

The puzzles on the right in the image above are my two Ravensburger puzzles. This brand is known for making high quality puzzles, which I find to be true. The pieces fit together nicely and are cut well, and you don’t see much, if any, peeling off of the image. The Pixar puzzle, because it’s essentially nine smaller puzzles in one, is a fast assembly, but that’s not a complaint.

Top left below is by Kodacolor and is of a standard subject, being one of 1) moored boats, 2) a mountain meadow, or 3) hot air balloons. Well-constructed, and otherwise nothing to write home about. Does Kodak even still make puzzles? [I found some on Amazon under Kodak Premium Puzzles that have mixed to decent reviews. Looks like it’s a different line than Kodacolor though.] Top right – the Las Vegas strip, made by Buffalo Games, who carry a variety of styles of puzzles in various sizes, as well as card and board games (most of which I’ve never heard of). This puzzle has a lot of hotel windows and is also my largest puzzle at 2000 pieces.

Bottom right is the borrowed puzzle from Hinckler’s Mindbogglers series. It has the dubious honor of being the worst-made puzzle in this post. The poor cutting left pieces still attached to each other and caused the bottoms of tabs to peel off. To add insult to injury, the pieces didn’t feel good when being put together. Bottom left comes from Springbok. No complaints about this 1500-piece puzzle.

In the next set of puzzles, we begin with the abstract squares by Talicor, winner of the tightest-fitting, almost overtight, pieces award. It’s a two-sided puzzle that will allegedly “test your best effort,” but at only 81 pieces, it has absolutely nothing (nothing, I’m telling you) on the infamous Dalmatian puzzle. To at least make it a moderate challenge, they do make the horizontal and vertical cuts on opposite sides of the symmetric, oddly-shaped pieces so you can’t immediately tell which side is the top or bottom. It’s still fixable in less than an afternoon. Moving on to a shuttle launch from Eurographics and a Thomas Kinkade mountain cabin from Ceaco. Like Springbok, these two manufacturers offer a variety of puzzles that are decently made – it’s reasonably clear when pieces fit together and small groups of pieces will stay together when moved. Lots of sky in the shuttle launch, interesting textures in the Kinkade.

The penultimate puzzle is Van Gogh’s Starry Night, made by Go! Games. My senior year apartment at Cornell had a copy of a Starry Night puzzle that a previous resident assembled and glued onto cardboard. My roommates put it up on the living room wall as decoration, which already made it about a hundred times better than most of the guys’ apartments. This puzzle wins the loosest-fitting pieces award. Some people may be put off by this; I call it an additional challenge to go along with 800 pieces of blue and yellow swirls and 200 pieces of mostly darkness.

Finally, it’s my only shaped puzzle, winner of the most missing pieces award, a dragon from F.X. Schmid. Turns out F.X. Schmid was acquired by Ravensburger in 1998, so who knows how old this puzzle is? The pieces fit slightly tighter than Starry Night, and the novelty of the shape is fun. So there you have it. Eleven puzzle manufacturers, two of which may not exist anymore, fourteen puzzles, and over 14,000 puzzle pieces.