The first puzzle is the Impossibles puzzle “Great Wall of China,” with 750 pieces, no edge pieces, and 5 extra pieces. The Impossibles puzzles are released under the BePuzzled name, which was acquired in 1999 by University Games from Lombard Marketing. University Games was founded in 1985 and creates/distributes a variety of educational and classic games and puzzles. There are several Impossibles puzzles no longer being manufactured (including “Great Wall of China,” which has a copyright from 1994), and a few new ones currently available. One thing to note is that some of the new puzzles have a repeating pattern, not a fully semi-randomized picture (see this Karen Puzzles video), making them significantly easier.
However, even with a moderately challenging picture, I didn’t find “Great Wall of China” hugely difficult (and it definitely wasn’t impossible). I don’t usually start with the edge pieces anyway, so the lack of an edge didn’t throw me off too much, and neither did the extra pieces. They did add a little extra twist, and make the puzzle harder than a “normal” 750 piece puzzle. Quality was good, the image was interesting, and I enjoyed this puzzle overall.
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| Great Wall of China |
The second puzzle up is an I Spy puzzle of almost nothing but marbles. This 500-piece puzzle was released in 2008 by Briarpatch, which began in 1992 as a children’s game and puzzle company and continued until 2014, when they were bought by University Games. Obviously, I chose to do this puzzle because who would be dumb enough to spend a couple afternoons assembling almost nothing but marbles? It wasn’t as bad as the dalmatians, and the extremely obvious red border was an easy start. I thought the idea was fun, because after (or while) fixing the puzzle, you can look for the objects in the rhyme included on the puzzle, like in an I Spy book. The only negative for me is that it’s not cut particularly well. False fits weren’t a huge problem, but the pieces don’t click together nicely, which, yes, is a thing that people care about.
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| I Spy marbles |
Third, we have a puzzle that wasn’t meant to be difficult, but it has a gimmick, so I’m including it here. On the box, it’s called “The Moving Puzzle – Coral Reef,” and was made in 1994 by the Great American Puzzle Factory, which based on the dearth of information about the company online, no longer exists (the Wikipedia article redirects to Fundex Games, Ltd., a company based in Indiana that started in 1986, produced an assortment of toys and games, and filed for bankruptcy in 2012).
For the molecular dynamics people, this puzzle is supposed to have a repeating boundary condition. For the non-MD people in the crowd, you’re supposed to be able to take the top row of pieces and move them to the bottom, or the left-most pieces and shift them to the right side, and still have a coherent picture. However, because of a misalignment in the image or cutting, the picture somewhat noticeably doesn’t match up when you try this after solving the puzzle in the “default” position. Also worth noting is that the pieces don’t lock together at all. They have indents that help to hold them in place, but every piece is exactly the same shape, so the puzzle is solved entirely by the image, which is doable since it only has 294 pieces and the picture has plenty of colors. I really like the idea, but unfortunately, they didn’t quite manage to pull it off.
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| Moving Coral Reef (left: completed puzzle, top right: box, middle right/bottom right: misaligned image) |
Next is the 131-piece Rubik’s Zigzaw puzzle from 1982, made by the Ideal Toy Company. The company began in 1907, and was eventually sold, first to CBS Toys, then Viewmaster International, and then Tyco Toys, which merged with Mattel in 1997. Ideal Toy Company was at one point the largest doll-making company in the US, but they also produced the Rubik’s Cube, on which the Zigzaw is based. Similarly to the coral reef puzzle above, many of the pieces are the same shape. In this case, the center pieces are mostly frog-like shapes that tesselate, and the objective is to make sure all the Rubik’s cubes are correctly solved. It’s harder than it may sound, because some of the pieces are very similar, differing only in the color of one “arm,” though slight printing/cutting misalignments sometimes let you see the color of an adjacent cube face that you shouldn’t be able to see. The pieces fit together very tightly, so you have to be careful taking pieces apart to not damage the thin arms. Other than that, it was a good challenge.
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| Rubik's Zigzaw (left: completed puzzle, top right: non-frog interior piece and edge piece, middle right: similarly colored frog pieces, bottom right: misaligned printing shows color of adjacent pieces) |
Finally, presenting the World’s Most Difficult Puzzle, jungle edition. The World’s Most Difficult Puzzles were originally made by Buffalo Games, but it seems that the line, with a few new puzzles, is now produced by TDC games, a board game and jigsaw puzzle manufacturer. This is the same idea as the infamous dalmatian puzzle – it’s a double-sided 529-piece puzzle with the pictures rotated 90 degrees from each other, and it’s cut vertically, then flipped over and cut horizontally so the pieces have no “back” or “front.” Probably fortunately for my sanity, the jungle puzzle was nowhere near as difficult as the dalmatian puzzle. The picture was orders of magnitude easier. Dare I say it was almost disappointingly easy? I’m actually a big fan of the concept, but I have yet to find the perfect image that’s more than “a few afternoons” hard but not “sitting on the coffee table for seven months” hard. Maybe I’ll try the penguins puzzle next, if I can get ahold of it.
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| World's Most Difficult Puzzle jungle edition |
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