I bought this because I’ve found I like images with water. And I did enjoy the water, but then, unfortunately, I also had to do the forest 🙂 OK, it wasn’t too bad, but definitely took a lot longer than the average 1000 piece puzzle that I do.
Many Castorland puzzles have titles that begin with “Copy of…”, but I’m not sure what that means, exactly. Anyway, the puzzle was nice and reasonably easy.
Quick and easy Castorland 500-piece puzzle. Nice, if unspectacular. Only the red tree on the right was a bit tricky.
Pagoda at the Black Dragon Pond in China (Old Town of Lijiang, Yunnan province).
Nice puzzle, not too difficult.
Pang Pa-In Palace in Thailand. My memory of this is at least as fuzzy as the image.
Turns out, Castorland also uses the same dies for 500 piece puzzles, but in this case, the puzzles fit on each other so that the other image needs to be upside down. That was something I hadn’t considered. The two jigsaws I used were Sunset Harbour and The Stony Bridge.
These work a bit better than the previous ones, but nothing spectacular yet. The puzzle mashup artist, Tim Klein, did say that he preferred older puzzles because new ones are so busy and full of detail. I think he’s right, this mashup thing would probably work better with less stuff in the images, to begin with. I kind of like the sunshade landing in the garden, though.
Another 500 piece Castorland puzzle.
I like Castorland more and more, and it’s also nice to do these smaller puzzles. Took me a couple of hours.
Another easy one. I probably wouldn’t have gotten this a couple of years ago, but recently I have started to enjoy this type of “idyllic cottage” theme in puzzles.
Castorland is a Polish manufacturer. The pieces are much thinner than Ravensburger or Heye, but not so thin that it’s a problem. The fit is excellent, and pieces only fit where they belong. Considering that their puzzles are much cheaper than the premium brands, I think they are excellent value.
Maps, especially old maps, used to be one of my favourite puzzle themes, but eventually, I got a little tired of them. The same thing happened before with Alpine landscapes, but I would be happy to do either of those again.
World maps from the 17th and 18th Century usually show the two hemispheres as circles, and around everything, there are various illustrations, sometimes of ancient gods and myths, sometimes of scientists or scenes from world history. The world looks pretty much as it does on modern maps, except that Australia is usually missing, or at least severely disfigured. The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was by a Dutch ship in 1606, and even before that there were theories that there is an undiscovered southern continent (often present on maps as Terra Australis, Southern Country). Information about the landing was probably not immediately available to the map makers at the time, and even if it were, it wasn’t nearly enough to produce realistic maps. Also, India often looks way too small, and the far east is somewhat disfigured. But all in all, you know it’s our earth, not, say, Middle Earth of Tolkien. Which can not be said for some of the really old (mediaeval) maps…
Here are some old map puzzles:
Puzzler1909 