Month: July 2022

Underwater Life, 2022-07-10

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I previously wrote about Trefl’s series of cardboard puzzles with whimsies, and claimed I had one. Well, it turned out I was mistaken, but that was easily fixed, of course. There are four puzzles in the Hidden Shapes series, with piece count ranging from 1003 to 1060. The actual piece counts are on the box instead of the usual “1000”.

Underwater Life, Trefl, 1060 pieces. Completed on July 10, 2022.

There are 10 whimsies, all of them composite, so that they take up a large part of the puzzle:

The whimsies seem to be sea-related, although I’m not sure what the bottom two are supposed to be:

The overall quality of the puzzle is the same as normal Trefl puzzles, that is to say good, but not exceptional. Obviously, there are quite a few pieces that are not fully interlocking, and I was wondering if that would be more annoying with a cardboard puzzle than with a wooden one since the pieces are lighter. I didn’t really feel there was any difference in that regard. Of course, you spend some time pushing pieces back together, but you do that with wooden puzzles as well. Based on this experience, I see no reason why whimsies should be exclusive to wooden puzzles, they work just as well with cardboard, and it is fun working with non-standard piece shapes.

Helsinki City Plan 1876, 2022-07-08

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Well, this turned out to be harder than I was expecting. Story of my life 🙂 The districts that are marked with colours were the easiest part, but even that wasn’t all that easy. Then there’s a lot of text, but it was so small that I had to use a magnifying glass all the time. On the right, there’s a list of notable buildings, and even a section on buildings that were being built in 1876. On the left, there’s a list of the blocks for each district (the blocks in the oldest parts of Helsinki have names in addition to numbers, and often they’re named after animals).

Helsinki City Plan 1876, Lautapelit.fi, 1000 pieces. Completed on July 8, 2022.

This is a puzzle by the in-house brand of board game store Lautapelit.fi, but it’s not their best work, unfortunately. The fit was a bit off, but not too bad, and there was a good mix of piece shapes.

The place where I live is to the north of this map, I guess that was just wilderness in 1876 🙂

Surprise!: Horses, 2022-07-03

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The Surprise series by Mordillo always consists of four panels, but the last is not on the box. If you want to see how this race ends, you can click here to see the entire image.

Surprise!: Horses by Mordillo, Heye, 1000 pieces. Completed on July 3, 2022.

This was actually a rather strange puzzling experience. After I finished the jockeys and the hedge, I couldn’t make much progress. I finished the borders, and then I had to leave for Helsinki. Usually, when you leave a puzzle for several weeks, you sort of have to start over, because you’ve forgotten (almost) everything you learned about the puzzle, but in this case, it turned out to be a good thing. When I came back last Saturday, expecting some hard work on this, it seemed much easier. The pieces just fell into place. Puzzling is strange sometimes 🙂

Omnivore, 2022-07-02

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Great image again in the Zozoville series, but this time the background was really difficult. This took me an entire week to complete, although it’s partly because it’s very hot in Finland right now, and my small mobile AC can just about cope with keeping my bedroom tolerable. This week, I have spent more time in my cool bedroom watching the tennis in Wimbledon than puzzling in my hot livingroom.

Omnivore, Heye, 1000 pieces. Completed on July 2, 2022.

This was the first of this years Heye’s, and the cut is different than what I’ve seen from Heye before. Some of the tabs are round, and some are slightly pointy – very similar to Wasgij pieces, in fact. While most of the puzzle was a normal grid cut with rows and columns matching up perfectly:

there were also some ribbon cut areas thrown in:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen (of at least noticed) types of cut being mixed like this, usually it’s one or the other. Anyway, the pieces were nice, and they definitely use the same material for the image layer as before, it felt like a Heye. There was one big problem, though. I had two false fits, both with three points of contact. Only the fact that I couldn’t find the following piece told me that it had to be wrong, but it looked really good. This is very unfortunate, as I rate precision of the cut above pretty much all else in determining the quality of a puzzle.