I felt like doing a puzzle from the Funky Zoo series and pulled one out at random. It turned out to be Australian habitat, topical in a sad way right now. I hope for much rain for Australia, and that the awful fires are soon over.
The puzzle is lovely, I really like this series. There are lots of fun details, as usual, although some of them start to look familiar. Not just the entrance and exit, and the fence in the background, but some people, too:
The first puzzle that I started in 2020 is a 3000-piece world map from Heye. I haven’t done a world map in quite a while!
It’s not an old map, but a modern map made in the style of old maps. The artist is Rajko Zigic, who has also done the Heye pirate map. The puzzle is from 2008, and it’s made in Germany (Heye moved production to Eastern Europe about 10 years ago). When I opened the box and spread out the pieces, I noticed a rather pungent smell, apparently from the glue used. I can’t remember ever noticing something like that before with Heye. I bought this new in 2008, so the smell was definitely from production. Anyway, in a couple of days it dissipated, so no problem, really, but strange.
Another thing I can’t recall seeing in a Heye puzzle before: pieces with one side without tab or hole. Educa still has this type of piece, but I can’t think of another major manufacturer that has these, at least not with a standard grid cut.
With 3000-piece puzzles, I’ve usually spread out some of the pieces on pieces of cardboard to leave some room to work on the table, but this time, I decided to spread out all the pieces on the table. Pretty soon I got a piece of cardboard anyway, and I did the edges on that.
While I really like having all the pieces on the table in front of me, that didn’t work so well with this image. After I had completed the edges and border, I wanted all the pieces within the edges to be more or less in the area they belonged, that means no random pieces. I still only have one piece of cardboard, though.
I’ve done most of the non-map stuff, like compasses, ships and monsters, so when I get back to Dortmund I will get on with the more difficult part of the puzzle.
Heye has finally released their 2020 catalogue (the 2019 catalogue became available in November 2018), and there are some nice ones in there. I went to my local puzzle shop in Helsinki, and they already had some of the new puzzles. I got three:
There are two more puzzles that I absolutely must have, a new puzzle in the Inner Mystic series, and an adorable selfie monster from the Zozoville series:
Pantone is, apparently, a colour management system widely used in many industries. The things you learn while puzzling 🙂
As a puzzle, this was one of those where you know exactly what to do all the time. I’ve done many puzzles lately where I place pieces here and there with no clear plan, but this was very clear and quite easy.
I started with the colours at the bottom, then on to the lime-coloured stripe on the right. This turned out to be the most difficult part, and I even sorted the pieces according to shape, but the cut was so great that it wasn’t much of a problem. I’ve grown more and more fond of Clementoni, and it’s now up there with Ravensburger and Heye for me.
I went on to do the blue bowl, the plate, the table and finally, the limes and the green background. There are three other puzzles in the Pantone-series, not must-haves, but I will get them if I see them at a good price. This was my last completed puzzle for 2019.
This was a great puzzle except for the boring cut (all pieces with two tabs opposite). Fun image, strong colours, and the quality was great. I was appalled that the children are playing hockey in the street, but at least they’re not wearing skates 🙂 Before I started working on this, I assumed they were on a frozen lake, but lakes don’t come with stop signs. The kid with #9 is wearing a jersey that looks exactly like the ones my favourite hockey team, HIFK, wears.
I had heard that new Eurographics have this boring cut, but this was my first experience with it. There are still 13 Eurographics puzzles in my to-do pile, no doubt some of them will have this cut as well, but not all. I bought this about a year ago, and my latest Eurographics purchase was about a month ago. I pulled out my newest Eurographics, and that still has the random cut that I’ve always associated with Eurographics:
There’s also this on the box:
From now on I’m going to assume that Eurographics has the boring cut unless I see this on the box. And if I find one of these cut with only two-tabs-opposite pieces, I’m going to complain about false advertising 🙂
Another thing a noticed: the one with the random cut is made in Germany:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Eurographics puzzle that was made in Europe before, it’s always been Canada or the USA.
The puzzle with the boring cut is American:
A zombie Marilyn Monroe. Not really a fan of the image, but it was pretty entertaining to work on, except for pieces fitting where they don’t belong, as happens with Educa.
Zombis is, apparently, a registered trademark, but I don’t know if it’s a cartoon, or an art project or something else entirely. I expect there are other puzzles in the series, but it’s unlikely I’ll be buying them.
Here’s an extra post with my stats for 2019. I completed 113 puzzles and placed 101 494 pieces (I’m counting one section of an 18 000-piece puzzle as one 4500-piece puzzle). This is up from last year when I completed 75 puzzles and placed 85 659 pieces. I don’t think I will surpass this year before I retire 🙂
Here’s a breakdown according to brand:
| Brand | Amount | % |
| Ravensburger | 27 | 24% |
| Heye | 13 | 12% |
| Clementoni | 10 | 9% |
| Tactic | 5 | 4% |
| Peliko | 4 | 4% |
| Grafika | 4 | 4% |
| Schmidt | 4 | 4% |
| Castorland | 3 | 3% |
| Eurographics | 3 | 3% |
| Educa | 2 | 2% |
| D-Toys | 2 | 2% |
| Unicef | 2 | 2% |
| Trefl | 2 | 2% |
| Extra Goods | 2 | 2% |
| Unknown | 2 | 2% |
| Gibsons Puzzle | 2 | 2% |
| Jumbo | 2 | 2% |
| Step Puzzle | 1 | 1% |
| de-luxe | 1 | 1% |
| Cloudberries | 1 | 1% |
| Ingham Day | 1 | 1% |
| Borussia Dortmund | 1 | 1% |
| White Mountain Puzzles | 1 | 1% |
| atregio | 1 | 1% |
| Artifact | 1 | 1% |
| Victory | 1 | 1% |
| Lautapelit.fi | 1 | 1% |
| Puzzle Michèle Wilson | 1 | 1% |
| MasterPieces | 1 | 1% |
| Calvendo | 1 | 1% |
| MB | 1 | 1% |
| Sunsout | 1 | 1% |
| Micropuzzle | 1 | 1% |
| Bluebird Puzzle | 1 | 1% |
| Nathan | 1 | 1% |
| Cobble Hill | 1 | 1% |
| New York Puzzle Company | 1 | 1% |
| Wardsback | 1 | 1% |
| Dino | 1 | 1% |
| Play Time | 1 | 1% |
| Karmin International | 1 | 1% |
| Grand Total | 113 | 100% |
Like last year, Ravensburger and Heye top the list, although this time Ravensburger is the clear number one, and Clementoni is up to third.
Here’s the breakdown according to piece count:
| Pieces | Amount | % |
| 1000 | 43 | 38% |
| 500 | 31 | 27% |
| 1500 | 7 | 6% |
| 759 | 7 | 6% |
| 2000 | 6 | 5% |
| 300 | 3 | 3% |
| 200 | 2 | 2% |
| 150 | 2 | 2% |
| 250 | 2 | 2% |
| 100 | 1 | 1% |
| 4000 | 1 | 1% |
| 108 | 1 | 1% |
| 3000 | 1 | 1% |
| 30 | 1 | 1% |
| 600 | 1 | 1% |
| 80 | 1 | 1% |
| 4500 | 1 | 1% |
| 313 | 1 | 1% |
| 350 | 1 | 1% |
| Grand Total | 113 | 100% |
The top 3 is unchanged here, but there are much more 500-piece puzzles than last year.
I thought I’d share one more statistic, not so much about my puzzling activity as about other people’s. I have mentioned before that, most days, over 90% of traffic to my blog is about the Exit/Escape-puzzle series that I have a spoiler page for. Well, apparently, these puzzles have been really popular as Christmas presents, because on Christmas week I had almost four times the traffic of any other week:
I also feel confident in saying that the best selling puzzle in the series by a large margin is Witches Kitchen, with the Observatory coming in second.
Happy New Year!
This is the best New Year puzzle I’ve ever seen. It was released in 1999 (as you can probably guess from the title), and I originally bought it 20 years ago. Unfortunately, I lost that puzzle (I still don’t know what happened to it), but earlier this year I bought another copy (still factory sealed). I’m not going into how much I paid, but I’m not sorry! I still loved every piece of this great puzzle, and I’m going to take better care of it this time. I wish Heye still used Jabo, he’s done some great images. I also see no reason why this puzzle shouldn’t still be in print, it would be great for any new year, not just 2000.
I did most of the bottle first, then onto the fireworks and the “Happy New Year” text.
There are lots of great details. Here are some unconventional spacecraft as well as the more familiar Enterpolice, with a pointy-eared pilot at the helm.
Some devils are partying with fiery drinks …
… and the Rolling Bones perform.
Someone’s been abducted, but at least the aliens look nice.
The text and fireworks glow in the dark, but it’s incredibly hard to get good photos of that. This is the best I could do, the right half looks good, but it’s still blurry on the left.
Happy New Year!
My first New York Puzzle Company Puzzle! There’s one piece missing (an edge piece on the right), which isn’t much of a surprise since this is one of the puzzles that were brought into the library. I’ve realized that one reason why so many puzzles that our library users do are missing pieces is that the cleaning staff use these big machines when they clean the floors, so if you drop a piece and don’t notice, that piece is probably a goner.
The cut reminded me of Sunsout, except the blades were sharper than the ones that cut the last Sunsout puzzle I did. Overall this was a very enjoyable puzzle, many old New Yorker covers make great puzzles! New York Puzzle Company-puzzles have recently become available in one of the online stores I use, so there will probably be some more of these eventually.
This is not exactly my type of puzzle, I’m not usually a fan of traditional Christmas puzzles, and I would never have chosen this myself, but I got it in a lot with a bunch of other puzzles. I didn’t like it much at first, but I got more into it towards the end, but if it hadn’t been a Ravensburger, I’m not sure I would have finished it.
On the box, it says “20th Anniversary Limited Edition”, but I’m not sure what that’s referring to. Not the image, because that’s copyright 2016. Then I started to imagine a series of puzzles, all called Santa’s Christmas Party, where you start out with traditional, glossy Christmas images, but over the years it grows progressively darker, ending up with elves taking meth to keep up with toy production and a drunk Santa vomiting in the punch 🙂 Yeah, I know, I’m never going to be put in charge of a series of Christmas puzzles. Because I think Hugleikur Dagsson‘s series Santa Exposed would make great puzzles (Warning! NSFW, naughty, and often gross! You have been warned!)
Anyway, since there seems to be only one puzzle called Santa’s Christmas Party, but a great many beginning with the word Santa, this probably refers to the Santa-series. They could be clearer about what anniversary this is. Also, how come Santa has time to party on Christmas?
Nice little detail: there’s a Ravensburger puzzle among the presents.
Merry Christmas!
Puzzler1909 