Lovely collage of clocks by Grafika. Fun and easy, and probably the best quality Grafika that I’ve ever done. The pieces were thicker than usual, and very few pieces were stuck together, which is a problem I’ve had with Grafika in the past.
Another great Marino Degano image, this time a bouquet of flowers with lots of bugs.
There are references to a lot of football teams in this, and this is the first time I’ve seen a reference to Borussia Dortmund in a Marino Degano puzzle: a bee is holding up a BVB flag! On either side there are fans of AC Milan and Chelsea, and I think the Allez les Verts points to French team St. Etienne. The reds with the You’ll Never Walk Alone-banner must be from Liverpool, although the song has been taken up by many other clubs, and is always sung seven minutes before kickoff in Dortmund.
Hippie bus and flower moonshine.
Again, there are refrences to existing websites: cucaracha.fr is again a site by Marino Degano, in French and looks like it’s for children. Projektraumobjekt.com also exists, and it’s some sort of interior design business in Hamburg.
On the cockroach website, there was a link to website about the Historia Comica-puzzles, with lots of early sketches. Very interesting!
Unfortunately, this was again one of the worst Heyes with regard to quality. Thin cardboard and pieces that wouldn’t lie flat made it difficult to know whether a piece belonged or not. I wanted to do the edges early but had to give up on that, the quality just wasn’t good enough. The date on the bag is October, 2016.
This is my second Galison puzzle, and like with the first, all the pieces are of the basic shape with two tabs opposite. I bought this knowing it would almost certainly have this boring cut, but sometimes the image is just too great to pass up. I would definitely get more Galison puzzles if they had more variety in the piece shapes. The images are great, and the quality is otherwise nice.
Another Funky Zoo puzzle, one of my favourite series. These are always so much fun, and this was no exception. One thing I missed was the cleaning lady that has been present in all other Funky Zoo puzzles I’ve done. Maybe she’s on vacation, although it wouldn’t surprise me if she quit, given the working conditions 🙂
There were quite a few cats in this one 🙂
Someone’s been sent to sleep with the fishes:
As for the quality of the puzzle, I’m happy to report that it’s excellent. The date on the bag says October 2016, and I found none of the problems I’ve had with some 2015-2016 Heyes.
My second eeBoo puzzle, they do have some lovely images. This was pretty easy, with areas of different colours and patterns.
eeBoo puzzles have a very shiny finish, but I don’t mind that, and there wasn’t much glare anyway. The cut is very good, but there were some damaged pieces:
Not too bad, but at over 20 EUR these puzzles are really expensive in Europe.
Another installment in Marino Degano’s Life series. As always, great fun!
A lot of fleas live on the cat, and they are trying to keep out the ticks and the mosquitoes:
Some ticks try to get in wearing false noses to look like fleas:
The fancy part of cat, but on the right, the builders have stumbled onto an old burial ground, and all of us who have seen Poltergeist know exactly where this is heading…
The Stray Cats are playing:
After I had another less than stellar quality Heye right before I left for Dortmund, I consulted my database and found that I bought 38 (yes, really) Heye puzzles in 2016 (which is when both of my disappointing Heyes were produced). I brought some of the ones I haven’t done yet with me, and this is one of those. The date on the bag is September 2015. The pieces are indeed quite thin, but the fit is very good, and the pieces also lie flat. Given a choice, I would always like that extra mm of thickness in the pieces, but overall, this is fine.
By the way, the cat is wearing a QR code around the neck. My phone couldn’t read it off the puzzle itself, but when I read it off the poster it worked. It leads to a website by Marino Degano, where he’s shared some early versions for some of his puzzle art. There are also a couple of online jigsaw puzzles (all part of the Dog’s Life puzzle). Sadly, it hasn’t been updated since 2016.
So, I was feeling pretty good about the quality of Grafika, but then I did this Clementoni right after Fish Magic, and I have to say, as soon as poured out the pieces, I remembered what true quality feels like. Grafika is all right, but not really top notch.
Movie poster collages may be my most favourite type of puzzle, and I knew this would go very fast (it’s only 500 pieces), so I did it without using the image on the box to prolong the pleasure. It was still pretty fast 🙂
I counted posters for 34 movies (some movies have two posters), and I’ve seen about a third of them. Some of them don’t quite fit the title, especially North by Northwest & Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I finally managed to finish Fish Magic, a painting by Paul Klee from 1925. The dark parts were quite challenging, and some pieces probably are placed wrong (there were at least two places for each piece where they fit perfectly, and sometimes it was very difficult to know which slot was correct). Each row had a repeating pattern, so that the exact same shape would appear twice in each row. I used this to identify what shape of piece I was looking for, and that helped a lot.
I even had some of the pieces in orderly rows to make it easier to find pieces. I’m usually far too lazy for something like this, but with this one, I really needed all the help I could get.
Next, I will do something much easier!
I’ve now reached the “WTF was I thinking?”-stage with this puzzle. All of the remaining pieces (1000+) of this 2000-piece puzzle are very dark. At least it’s a Grafika and the precision of the cut is excellent, but this will take some time.
This year I’ve been very good about not buing a lot of puzzles, but now that I’m in Germany and get free shipping from my favourite puzzle vendors, I put in two rather large orders. Here’s what I got:
I finished the Artist’s Studio Escape / Exit puzzle. I won’t post a photo of the finished puzzle here, but you can find it along with thoughts on the puzzles within the puzzle on my dedicated spoiler page.
As I expected, this turned out to be perhaps the most enjoyable jigsaw puzzling experience of all the Exit puzzles. Until the very end when I had to do the edges, that is. The puzzle had a rating of 5/5 difficulty for the puzzles within the puzzle, and I couldn’t solve all of them even with the help provided by Ravensburger.
The backstory was again a bit different in English than in German, but only in small details this time. The story is that in the early 16th Century, your master has been arrested, and you rush to the studio to do away with any incriminating evidence (it’s not entirely clear of what, but of some kind of illicit art). The final solution was quite funny, and I didn’t quite see it coming (usually it’s quite easy), so I really enjoyed that, too. All in all, one of the best Exit-puzzles, I would say.
Puzzler1909 