Another adorable Zozoville monster. Like most of the Zozoville puzzles, this was pleasantly challenging. I did the monster first, then the sea, and finally the sand.
Beach Boy, 2023-06-25
Month: June 2023
Fantasy Forest, 2023-06-19
This was something different! A wooden Ravensburger puzzle. It’s manufactured in Poland, and it turned out to be very similar to the Trefl wooden puzzles. The cut is excellent, and the puzzle was a complete joy to put together. The pieces are a bit thinner than some premium brands, like Artifact, and they are also smaller (the finished puzzle is 40×27 cm, when a cardboard 500 piece Ravensburger is 49×36 cm), but the fit is great, and the price was very reasonable – I paid 24 EUR for this.
Here’s a close-up of the cut:
There were 40 whimsies, and with the exception of the wizard hat, I think every item can be found in the puzzle itself:
The owl whimsy is even part of the owl:
On the back, there was a pattern, similar to patterns on Trefl wooden puzzles:
It occurred to me that this sort of pattern would be really useful with a puzzle with an ambiguous cut, but it’s not at all needed with an excellent cut like this. Too bad the puzzles that need this never have it.
WASGIJ? Highway Hold-Up!, 2023-06-18
This was a Destiny Wasgij, where you see a scene from the past and puzzle a contemporary image. I have to say, the puzzle image didn’t have much to do with the box image, and I was almost finished when I worked out the idea of the puzzle image. If you want to see the finished image, you can click here.
Portal of the four Realms, 2023-06-14
Fantasy type image, although it seems more like the four seasons than the four realms. On the left, it is clearly winter on top, and an autumnal scene below. Not sure which is summer and which spring on the right though. The winter pieces were the easiest to pick out, but turned out to be the hardest to put together, so that I pulled them first but ended up doing that section section last.
Quality was, again, top notch. I’m getting more and more fond of the rather tight fit that Schmidt has nowadays, it’s very satisfying when putting the puzzle together, but a bit of a pain while taking it apart.
Not a Drop, 2023-06-10
Here it’s pretty clear what is happening: the duck wants a bath, but there is no water. The title in Finnish is “Ei pisaraakaan”, which (for once) has exactly the same meaning as the English title.
There are no dates on the puzzles, I only know what year the paintings are from, but the older puzzles have normal sized boxes, and the newer smaller boxes. This was one of the newer ones (just so we’re clear, they have all been out of print for years), and unfortunately, the quality is not as good as with the older puzzles. I’m pretty sure that there is still an error in the white wall, because I had to use force to get the last piece in. I did try to find the wrongly placed piece, but couldn’t see it, so I’m calling it done. I had a few other problems with false fits, but managed to sort them out. This was the worst quality duck puzzle so far.
In a Certain Phase, 2023-06-06
When I left for Dortmund on May 11, I also left this puzzle almost finished, there were maybe 150-200 pieces to go. In fact, it was going really well, and I was sorry to leave it, but finally I just had to go. It would be too stupid to miss a flight because of a puzzle. I was expecting it to be hard to get back into the puzzle, but actually, I finished it pretty fast. This was the best kind of Tactic, with very distinct piece shapes and a really good fit. This puzzle looks a lot harder than it is, it was actually fairly easy, and very entertaining.
Again, I have no idea what the title is supposed to mean. It’s called “Jossain vaiheessa” in Finnish, and if I were asked to translate that, I would probably say “At some point”, but the provided translation is definitely not incorrect.
Surrender, 2023-06-04
I’m back in Helsinki now, but before I left Dortmund, I managed to finish one more puzzle. It’s a nice image by Mordillo, but it’s not a Heye puzzle, but a Clementoni. Up until the artist’s death in 2019, I am only aware of Heye puzzles with images by Mordillo, but since then, Clementoni also has them. This was my first Clementoni with a Mordillo image.
I’ve actually done a very similar image before. There, the animals seem to be angry at person relieving himself against a tree, and here, it’s a hunter. Many of the animals look the same, or at least very similar. This was a fun, and fairly quick puzzle.
Ulysses and the Sirens, 2023-06-03
I got my act together and finished it! The image is a scene from Greek mythology. Ulysses (now usually known as Odysseus) is going to pass a place where Sirens (birds with the head of a woman) lure ships onto the rocks. They do this by singing, and their song is irresistible to men. Odysseus wanted to hear the song and survive, so he sealed the ears of his men with wax and had himself tied to the mast (instructing the men they should under no circumstances free him until they were clear of the Sirens), and so Odysseus became the only man to hear the Siren song and live.
While I really like the image, and especially the colours, much of the puzzle wasn’t all that pleasant, and it was mostly to do with the quality. I had quite a few false fits, and overall the fit wasn’t great. I was often unsure whether a piece really belonged where I’d placed it. I’ve done a few 1000-piece D-Toys puzzles, and those were definitely better. I probably won’t be doing any more 2K D-Toys puzzles.
Puzzler1909 