Very traditional Ravensburger with a pretty image from Norway. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. It was also the kind of puzzle where it was easy to find pieces for the various sections and I felt I knew exactly what to do all the time. One piece missing, unfortunately.
Wonderful puzzle from the Ravensburger Happy at Work series. I did it pretty much in one sitting, and was happy to find it complete, although I was worried about a sky piece there for a while 🙂 Loved every minute of it!
Great collage with four vintage posters for races in Italy. Many collages try to fit in too many images, and I really enjoyed this. It was a bit more difficult than I expected, but not much.
Another unnamed puzzle (sigh). The puzzle itself was great fun, and of good quality.
A beautiful painting by John William Waterhouse, painted in 1908. I was expecting the puzzle to be quite difficult, but it wasn’t that bad, really. I did the hair and skin first, and the darkest areas last.
Nice image of afternoon tea and books with winter in the background. The cups and pot turned out to be the most difficult part. You can make out some of the book titles, there are a couple of Alexander Dumas books, for example. The tiny red one is supposed to be the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, but I’ve read that one, and however thin the paper is there is no way the book can be that thin 🙂
A puzzle from the Heye Elixir-series, my first, I think. I’m not usually a fan of the gothic-type images (also, they look really difficult), but somehow, I loved this one. It wasn’t easy, but there was enough variaton in the background colour so that it wasn’t too bad, either.
Great news! I finally managed to find the last of the Kaj Stenvall duck puzzles. I first decided to try and collect the entire series in early 2019, and by July 2019 I already had 29 of the 30 puzzles that I’m aware of, and I’ve been looking for the last one ever since. When someone had a glued and framed copy for sale, I even considered getting that and taking it apart, but I’m really too lazy for something like that. The most frustrating moment came in October last year, when there was one for sale on a Finnish site (tori.fi), but I was in Dortmund, the seller offered pickup only (no shipping), and it was located 200 km from Helsinki in a place where I didn’t know anyone. Since I couldn’t possibly ask someone to drive 400 km in the middle of a pandemic for a puzzle, I just cursed silently to myself and wondered if I would ever find that last puzzle.
And then, on Monday, there was again a copy available, and it wasn’t even for sale, but given away. I was lucky I saw the posting almost immediately, and managed to get in first. It was, again, 200 km away, and I would have happily driven, but the previous owner very generously offered to send it if I paid for the postage. Which I was very happy to do, of course, in fact I was so happy that I paid a bit extra. Today I finally got my hands on this:
You can see all of the puzzles in the series on my dedicated page. Now I just have to do them all 🙂
Coto de Doñana is a national park in the south of Spain. This was, once again, a puzzle that turned out to be a lot more difficult than expected. For some reason I started with the greenish strips in the middle, and that probably wasn’t the wisest move. The precision of the cut isn’t all that good with newer Tactic puzzles, and somehow that felt especially problematic with this puzzle. I ended up spending almost a week on this, when I would have expected 2-3 days.
This puzzle is part of a new Educa series called Enigmatic, and it’s pretty obvious the series has been inspired by the Ravensburger Exit/Escape-series. I got this thinking there would be some mystery to work out, but these are just regular puzzles. I don’t mind, it was a nice puzzle 🙂
Puzzler1909 