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 🙂
I’m not a huge fan of traditional Christmas images, but some always find it into my pile regardless. Merry Christmas!
This was my first eeBoo-puzzle. They’ve recently become available on Puzzle-Offensive, where I often shop, and since they have many lovely images I decided to try one.
The finish is probably the shiniest I’ve ever come across. There was a good mix of piece shapes, but the precision of the cut wasn’t great – it wasn’t always easy to know if a piece belongs or not. All in all it still added up to a nice experience. The eeBoo puzzles are pretty expensive (most American brands are expensive in Europe), but I may well get one every now and then, for the great images.
My first reaction when I saw the title was “what cats”, but there actually are a couple of cats there:
This is part of a Clementoni series of puzzles with what they call a “wood-effect”, and on the box it even says “Wood Puzzle”. It’s not of wood, though, just ordinary cardboard, and the “wood effect” consists of the pieces having grooves that make it look like wood:
I know I’ve said many times that I’ve never met a 500-piece Clementoni that I didn’t like, but I’m afraid that run came to end with this one. The image (of Venice) was darker than on the box, and the grooves affected the fit, so that it was difficult to know whether a piece belongs or not. Good thing I got this cheap. It seems the series has been discontinued, and I won’t be getting any more of them in any case.
This was a great puzzle, definitely a genuine image from an Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ani has arrived in the afterlife and is now to be judged by Osiris. I have no idea what that thing on Ani’s head is, but it looks like the flash on a police car to me 🙂
It was a fun as a puzzle, even though it’s not all that colourful, but there were a lot of different patterns. Loved it!
I’m a little late today, because I wanted to be able to report that I’ve safely arrived in Helsinki, and now I have. I took a ferry from Travemünde to Helsinki, and the ferry was late, but I’m here now, and I’ve finally got all of my stuff from the car into my flat. I’m not moving a finger anymore today :-).
Great little Ravensburger with a map of Europe. I like maps, as long as there isn’t too much water.
Early next week, I will be returning to Helsinki with a ferry from Travemünde (a borough of Lübeck), and I found this puzzle that shows that the route has been popular for a long time 🙂
All of the city names are in Swedish or German (which is why it says Helsingfors instead of Helsinki, and Reval instead of Tallinn), and the text is in German. The puzzle is part of a Tactic series called Come to Finland, featuring old travel adverts for Finland.
I looked up some of the ships mentioned to try and date the poster, and it seems that the ships mentioned, Linnea and Storfursten (“The Grand Duke”), were both on this route from 1892 until the first world war. Interesting, and also lots of fun as a puzzle.
Somehow, I’ve never done a 500-piece Clementoni I didn’t enjoy, and this was no exception. It’s my second puzzle with an image from the island of Santorini, and both of them have been more difficult than they look.
The island itself is lovely, I visited briefly while on a cruise in 2009, and I would love to go back and stay a bit longer one day.
A Ravensburger double pack with two lighthouses:
The one on the left is from Brittany, France. I was surprised to see that the one on the right is called Lake Constance, since I recognized it as Bodensee, but it turns out, Bodensee is called Lake Constance in English 🙂 Unusually for Ravensburger, the titles were in English only. The box was no bigger than the usual 1000-piece boxes, proving once again that the puzzle boxes are twice as big as they need to be.
I did Lake Constance first. It was a pleasant puzzle of excellent quality, not too difficult.
The other puzzle was, of course, a lot more difficult. At least it would have been, if I hadn’t used the finished first puzzle as a blueprint. The two puzzles had exactly the same die cut pattern, so I started building the second on top of the other:
Took me a while to work out that it fits upside down on the first puzzle. Anyway, this was a lot easier when I knew exactly what piece shape I was looking for all the time.
At some point, I sorted the remaining pieces according to shape, and then I put in all the pieces with shapes other than two-tabs-opposite. This is what it looked like with only two-tabs-opposite-pieces left.
The finished puzzle:
The latest three Exit-Puzzles are branded as Exit Puzzle Kids, but the only real difference to the previous puzzles that I can see is that the stories are a bit tamer, in the previous puzzles they almost always involved imminent danger of death. I still find the puzzles really enjoyable, but I couldn’t be be bothered to spend much time on the mysteries. While I do like the big pieces, I still prefer the 759-piece Exit-puzzles.
So far, I’ve gotten all of the Exit-puzzles that are available (14 puzzles), but I think I’m going to cut down a bit now, and only get the ones where I really love the image. My favourite of these three was the amusement park, and the backstory actually sounded like a promising start to a horror movie 🙂 I finished all three puzzle in one day.
I’ve added links to photos of the finished puzzles to my spoiler page for the series.
Puzzler1909 