As always, I start the year by looking at my puzzling statistics for 2022. I assembled 145 puzzles and placed 134 854 pieces in 2022, up from last year’s 96 puzzles and 97 529. I did no really large puzzles in 2022, which at least partly explains the difference. In fact, the largest puzzle I did was 2000 pieces, and I only did three of those. Here’s the breakdown according to piece count:

While I always do more 1000 piece puzzles than any other piece count, last year the percentage was only 51%, now up to 70%. Also, I’ve done a lot less 500-piece puzzles than in 2021, that percentage is down to 10% from 25%.

Here’s the breakdown according to brand:

The top two are unchanged (although the Ravensburger percentage is down to 17% from 23% in 2021), but there’s a new number three, as Tactic has passed Clementoni. This is entirely due to the fact that I did a lot of Stenvall duck-puzzles this year, including the two most difficult in the series (both of them mostly white). If I keep it up, I’ll have gone through all the Stenvall puzzles in 2024.

One thing that I definitely failed at in 2022 was limiting acquisition of puzzles so that I would complete more puzzles than I acquired. In 2022, I acquired 197 puzzles and 187 165 pieces. That’s quite a bit more than I would ever be able to complete in a year. I’ll try to do better in 2023.

Happy New Year!

Last week, I bought a few puzzle from a recycling center. With one of the puzzles, I knew as soon as I picked it up that something was wrong – it was way too heavy. I just had to get it to find out what was in the box 🙂

The first thing I did was weigh the pieces, and then I weighed the pieces of a complete 1000 piece Clementoni puzzle (it’s a 1000 piece Clementoni box), and from that I was able to work out that there should be almost 3000 pieces in the box.

I was able to easily sort all the pieces into four piles just based on the colour on the back of the pieces:

There were small piles of grey and blue pieces, a green pile with pieces from at least two puzzles, and a large pile of light blue pieces. The light blue pieces are Clementoni pieces, and at least some of them are from the image on the box.

I tried out the grey-backed pieces first, but it wasn’t much use. From the size of the pieces, it’s very unlikely that the piece count is less than 500 pieces, and there are less than 200 pieces present, so this went into the bin pretty fast. There is some vegetation, and an animal, possibly a bird. That’s all I could make out.

Next, I tried the dark blue pieces:

Well, this is obviously an alpine landscape in autumn, but there are still a lot of pieces missing. I don’t mind missing pieces, but I want to be able to connect all the pieces that are there, you know, and that clearly wasn’t happening with this one, so it also ended up in the bin.

Next, the green pile. As I said, there were at least two puzzles in there, and one of them was of really bad quality. Not only were the pieces thin and all exactly alike, but a lot of them were actually broken:

I didn’t even try this, but went over to the other green pieces.

There are about 450 pieces here, and I was hopeful, I would be able to put this together, but I now think these pieces are from a 1000 piece puzzle, not a 500 piece puzzle. I could only find one corner piece. I can make out that there is sea, and some sails.

At this point I decided to do some other puzzles before I go on with the final, largest pile of pieces. I did another weigh-in, and there are about 1700 pieces left. They are all Clementoni pieces, and there are pieces from at least two puzzles left.