More pieces, more puzzles [collections]

Today on the blog we have puzzles featuring what I’m calling collections of things, specifically chocolate, doors, soda cans, and toy cars.

We’re starting with a 1000-piece puzzle aptly titled “Chocolate!” by Re-marks according to a Reddit post found by Google image search (the puzzle’s packed away and yes, in this case I am being too lazy to go look at the box). The Re-marks website doesn’t have a whole lot of information, but they seem to be a jigsaw puzzle-only company that’s on the newer side and operates on Pacific time. This was a fun, relatively quick solve that will probably make you want dessert if you’re a chocolate fan.

Chocolate!

Our second puzzle of the post is doors of all colors and styles. I’ve personally seen a couple different versions of this puzzle, and a quick search reveals at least half a dozen variations for sale, but the one we did was by Kodak (“Colorful Montreal Doors”). It looks like the Kodak Premium Puzzles line is now distributed by Cra-Z-Art, who are the ones responsible for the much maligned RoseArt crayons. I can’t speak to the quality of new Kodak puzzles, but the one we assembled was fine, and there’s something classic about the color and subject matter of a Kodak puzzle.

Doors

Next is soda cans of a vintage nature, another 1000-piece puzzle by Springbok (“Retro Refreshments”). One of the notable things about Springbok puzzles is their random cut, which could be a plus or minus depending on who you ask. Another thing about this puzzle in particular is that the soda cans are in the same order on the different rows, which again, some people may enjoy as an added challenge and some people may find frustrating. In my opinion, Springbok tends to make a quite cardboard-y feeling puzzle, and the pieces go together well, but the final product isn’t as smooth as a lot of other brands. It was still an enjoyable solve.

Soda cans

Last up for today is “Toy Car Spectrum,” a 1000-piece offering from Buffalo Games. It was similar to the other puzzles in this post in that they tend to be colorful and usually come together faster than landscape-type puzzles due to the colors and distinct lines between elements. In general, I like doing this kind of puzzle, especially when they’re acting as a palate cleanser after yet another world’s hardest gimmick puzzle I just had to try.

(Toy) Cars

I ran out of puzzle puns (for now) [character/IP puzzles]

It’s me, slipping back in before the new year to review some puzzles, in this case a few puzzles with characters from various franchises. The puzzles were completed between June 2022 and October 2023 and range from 300 to 3000 pieces.

First up is a puzzle of the Mandalorian and his baby alien Grogu hanging out in the Razor Crest. I solved this puzzle well before seeing The Mandalorian, but I’ve since seen the first season and enjoyed it. The puzzle is a 1000-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, maker of jigsaw puzzles and board games since 1986. It was a fairly straightforward assembly, a bit on the dark side but with enough color variation and texture to not require resorting to shape sorting or brute force trial and error. Buffalo Games puzzles are often found at stores like Target and Walmart, and tend to be slightly cheaper than puzzles from dedicated manufacturers such as Ravensburger or White Mountain Puzzles (sub-$20 vs. $20-$25 for 1000-piece puzzles). The quality is good but not amazing, and pieces fit together tightly enough to pick up sections of the puzzle, maybe the whole puzzle if you’re careful. You may get some pieces that feel like false fits, but looking more carefully at the pieces is enough to see if they really go together or not.

 

Mandalorian and Child

Next on the list was Hidden Cows, featuring hidden (and not so hidden) cows in a Sandra Boynton illustration. This was a fun solve, on the easier side thanks to all the colors and clear lines, and it was borrowed from the library. The puzzle comes from Workman Puzzles, started in 2020 as a branch of Workman Publishing Company, which was founded in 1968 but as of 2021 is now part of Hachette Book Group, one of the “big five” publishers.

Hidden Cows

The largest puzzle (by number of pieces) I’ve ever solved is this 3000-piece puzzle of Marvel superheroes. It was another loan from the library, and is produced by Aquarius Puzzles, who seem to specialize in licensed puzzles (they’ve also got a couple Star Trek puzzles and some Lord of the Rings puzzles). Quality is similar to Buffalo Games puzzles, so quite reasonable for the price point. As is fairly typical for these kinds of images, the dark parts with seemingly random lines and body parts dragged a bit, but it wasn’t too bad. In the end, it took 9 or 10 days to finish, compared to 2-3 days for a similar image on a 1000-piece puzzle, so time scaled pretty linearly with number of pieces.

Marvel Cast

And the largest puzzle is followed by the smallest puzzle of this group, a 300-piece puzzle of scenes from The Office. It was a very fast solve on a Saturday morning, pretty average in terms of quality, and fun for fans of the show. From what I can tell, the puzzle is made by the New York-based Cardinal Games, but there doesn’t seem to be much information about this company. Overall, this was an entertaining group of puzzles, and I actually just finished another Star Wars puzzle, but it’ll have to wait until next time.

Scenes from The Office

Falling to Pieces [puzzle time trials]

I was lurking on Reddit when I came across a post from the subreddit Hobby Drama, which details all the petty details of drama in any niche hobby you can imagine. One week in their “hobby scuffles” post where people are allowed to talk about almost anything, someone posted about watching an entire 40-minute video about the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship. Of course I had to see what that was about. At the competition, competitors are given puzzles of various sizes that they have to solve in under a set time. For a 500-piece puzzle, they were allotted 90 minutes, which is a short enough time that I could easily try it out for myself, because I was curious to see how feasible it was for someone who’s pretty fast (I think) compared to a casual puzzler, but nowhere near world champion speeds.

For my first attempt, I assembled a 500-piece puzzle of a giant girl jump roping on a bridge with a city in the background, by Ravensburger. This was not a great choice for a speed solve because of the muted and limited color palette and minimal distinctive features, but it was what we found at the library. At the 90 minute mark, I had completed most of the girl, the sky, and the water and bridge at the bottom. In the end, it took me just over two hours to finish the puzzle, half an hour longer than the competition time limit.

Giant jump rope girl (left: at the 90 minute mark, right: finished puzzle)

A few weeks later, I tried again with another Ravensburger puzzle, this one of a European-looking cobblestone street with a café, other shops and apartments, and people strolling along enjoying the day. This puzzle was a better candidate, with a greater variety of colors, but it still had large areas with a single texture/color (e.g. the street and building facades), which again, isn’t ideal for speed solving. However, I did manage to complete the puzzle in under 90 minutes, with a time of 1:28:32, showing that it is indeed possible for a fast-ish hobby puzzler to finish a 500-piece puzzle within an hour and a half.

European street

To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I borrowed a very Lisa-Frank-esque puzzle of dolphins in a slightly psychedelic sea from the library. It was manufactured by Cra-Z-Art, maker of subpar crayons but okay jigsaw puzzles. The fit of the puzzle pieces wasn’t as nice as Ravensburger, but was definitely still well within acceptable limits. I was concerned about the amount of blue, but was able to finish the puzzle in less than 90 minutes (in 1:28:49).

Psychedelic sea dolphins

Just for fun at this point, I did one last Ravensburger 500-piece puzzle of lockers containing assorted sports equipment. I thought it would be a straightforward solve because each locker was a different color, but it ended up being trickier that I anticipated and still took me an hour and 28 minutes flat. Since I seem to be stuck around the 1:28 mark, I’ll probably try a few more puzzles to see if I can get any faster without really trying vs. using more optimization techniques (fully sorting pieces, doing the edges sooner, etc.), though it does take some of the fun out of it.

Sports lockers

Piece by Piece [The World’s Most Difficult Puzzles]

If you’ve ever seen a limited edition flavor at the grocery store or anything proclaiming to be the “world’s hardest” and wondered, “who would want that?”, the answer is me. I would like to try cherry jalapeño yogurt, and today I’ll be reviewing a selection of puzzles that all have some kind of gimmick, including one that claims to be the world’s hardest puzzle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

World's Most Difficult Puzzle jungle edition

Everyday I’m Puzzling [White Mountain Puzzles]

Thanks to the library now lending out jigsaw puzzles, we’ve had a steady source of puzzles to assemble for free. Over the past nine months or so, we/I’ve put together a puzzle approximately every one to two weeks, with subject matter ranging from cats and books to marbles to pastoral scenes. Today I’ll highlight a few puzzles from White Mountain Puzzles.

White Mountain Puzzles was founded in 1978, and are still making puzzles today. They’re located in New Hampshire, in the White Mountains. Their website claims that their 24” by 30” 1000-piece puzzles are the largest in the industry. White Mountain Puzzles is perhaps best known for their collage-style puzzles, where they pick a theme like Broadway musicals or Christmas stamps, and make a collage out of related images. However, they do also have plenty of landscapes and Americana (general stores, drive-in theaters, etc.), based both on artwork and photographs. They offer hundreds of different puzzles; I found somewhere around 300-400 1000-piece puzzles listed on their website, though not all of them are always in stock.

Their puzzles are fun to solve and the collage puzzles in particular get put together pretty quickly because the individual images are easy to differentiate. The pieces fit together tightly, especially when new, so the entire puzzle can be picked up after assembly, and there are no false fits. The puzzles are random cut, and, though more cardboard-y than Ravensburger or Cobble Hill, overall high quality.

With that, here’s the first puzzle, titled “I Love Massachusetts,” and featuring such icons as Dunkin Donuts, Hoodsie cups, and Spock (Leonard Nimoy). This puzzle was designed/constructed by Charlie Girard, who does a lot of White Mountain’s collage puzzles based on photos/logos.

I Love Massachusetts

Next we have “Old Candy Store,” a candy store filled with jars of candy and excited patrons illustrated by Steve Crisp. This may be the only White Mountain puzzle I’ve done that isn’t a collage or map. It still came together pretty quickly, and had plenty of colors and interesting parts to put together.

Old Candy Store

“The New Millennium” is part of a series of puzzles based on different decades that are done by artist James Mellett. This series highlights important events and people, TV shows, athletic accomplishments, and foods and products associated with each decade. Along with the 1990s puzzle (The Nineties) that I also own, these two puzzles cover most of my childhood.

The New Millennium

Finally, we did “I Love America,” another Charlie Girard creation, which includes national icons like the Liberty Bell, NASA, hockey, and Play-Doh. My final verdict on White Mountain Puzzles: not the most difficult, but fun to assemble. Would recommend.

I Love America

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.

Home

When I finally made it home (we’re still back in December 2019), I had no plans except to go to Wegmans, bake a cake, and watch the latest Star Wars movie. It’s amazing how successful you can be at meeting your goals when you give yourself two weeks to go to a grocery store and watch a movie. Overall, my accomplishments for Christmas break included the following: 

– baking white chocolate/macadamia nut/Craisin cookies, cream puffs (choux pastry + crème patissiere), and a two-layer cake with whipped cream frosting and chocolate ganache all from scratch

– assembling two 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles

– using Netflix to watch Kim’s Convenience, The Irishman, The Two Popes, Mary Poppins Returns, and The Last Jedi, the last in anticipation of seeing The Rise of Skywalker at the movie theater [It was good. It’s a Star Wars movie, so be prepared for plenty of illogical decisions and departures from the laws of physics, but there are also lightsabers, spaceships, and lasers, which, let’s be honest, are the main highlights of a Star Wars movie.]

Clockwise from top left: cookies, slice of cake, cream puffs, top of cake

– getting dim sum. For all its self-proclaimed excellence, Ann Arbor doesn’t have many options for Chinese food, and none, as far as I’ve found, for dim sum.

– exploring Castle Island and Boston (Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market, the Common, Chinatown) [More on this in a separate post.]

– spending an abnormally warm Saturday afternoon raking leaves leftover from November

– spending a typically cold Tuesday morning (the day before I left) shoveling snow/slush off of the driveway. When I’m home, I shovel the straight part of our unnecessarily long driveway. I have a method, and it exercises both sides of the body equally.

Clockwise from top left: Clouds on the plane ride back to Ann Arbor, sunset over lake,
sunset at home, puzzle #1 (puzzle #2 was an underwater scene)

– going to Wegmans, where I admired their cheese selection and bakery

– ordering Christmas cards on New Year’s Eve. Christmas in January, anyone?

– not losing Monopoly to my brother’s girlfriend and her brother. Turns out if you actually follow the printed rules, the game doesn’t take twenty-seven days to play.

– not burning the church down at the Christmas Eve candlelight service

– watching Jeopardy!

– eating

– eating exactly one box of blueberry Chex

– sleeping

So that was Christmas break 2019.  It was great, and then I had to return to Ann Arbor to finish up another year of grad school. 

Shades of Grey

Besides LEGOs and furniture, I also assemble jigsaw puzzles at moderate to fast speeds. Recently, I’ve been getting my puzzles from the library book shop for $2, but occasionally people let me borrow puzzles, or, in one case, recruit me to help them finish a puzzle. The kinds of puzzles I buy are usually landscapes, but I also have a Hobbit puzzle, cupcakes, beer logos, and 90s pop culture. The kinds of puzzles people lend to me have descriptions like “features thousands of tiny images” and “world’s most difficult.” Case #1: the Dalmatian puzzle.

The summer I spent in Ithaca running all over the place, my friend and I got to talking about how we like puzzles. She mentioned that she had picked up a puzzle at the Salvation Army store that seemed like a challenge and handed it over to me to assemble. The puzzle had (only) 500 pieces. However, it was also double-sided, with the image on the back rotated 90 degrees; the picture featured hundreds of one-inch tall Dalmatians; and the pieces were cut in one direction, then the puzzle was flipped and rotated to make the cuts in the other direction so there was no way to tell which side was the top or bottom. I normally finish 1000-piece puzzles in about three days working a couple hours a day. Excessive sky or other monochromatic patches might add a day or two. The Dalmatian puzzle took months of periodic work. After I finished, it sat on the coffee table until I moved because I wanted to admire my work.

The Dalmatian puzzle

The following summer was the summer before I started grad school, which I spent mainly sprawled on the carpet in my 80-degree living room. When I arrived in Ann Arbor, I discovered the library book shop, which sells puzzles for $1 or $2, depending on whether they know if all the pieces are there or not. I built up my local puzzle collection and enjoyed several months of mountains, the Las Vegas strip, and a dragon.

Then this past summer, I was staying in temporary lodging between leases when I was informed of a puzzle that a family from church had been working on. They were having a busy summer, though, and hadn’t made much progress. I said I was up for the challenge, and got myself invited over for dinner and a jigsaw puzzle. After taco salad and ice cream, I took a look at what I had gotten myself into. Case #2: the Michigan Stadium, filled with 100,000 millimeter-scale fans all dressed in blue and yellow. As far as difficult puzzles go, it wasn’t horrible, but one pencil-tip-sized fan looks pretty much like all the other pencil-tip-sized fans. It took several puzzle fixing sessions, but I got it done (with a little help from some elementary school kids). [No picture, but this is the puzzle.]

Not long after that, another family from church allowed me the privilege of borrowing a puzzle they’d had for over twenty years and had never completed. Why? Case #3: the mosaic Lincoln puzzle. When complete, the picture was a portrait of Lincoln, composed of hundreds of smaller pictures, all in black and white. I’m sensing a theme here. This puzzle occupied me for several weeks at an awfulness level slightly less than the Dalmatian puzzle.

Lincoln's face as a mosaic.  The puzzle came missing the edge pieces;

I was not responsible for that.

Moral of the story: send me all your undone black and white puzzles of potatoes, or top hats, or lima beans, or whatever. I might solve them, or I might burn them.