As always, I start the year by looking at my puzzling statistics for 2022. I assembled 145 puzzles and placed 134 854 pieces in 2022, up from last year’s 96 puzzles and 97 529. I did no really large puzzles in 2022, which at least partly explains the difference. In fact, the largest puzzle I did was 2000 pieces, and I only did three of those. Here’s the breakdown according to piece count:

pieces	puzzles	%
1000	94	70%
500	28	10%
1500	9	10%
2000	3	4%
600	3	1%
1060	1	1%
1040	1	1%
1003	1	1%
750	1	1%
550	1	0%
501	1	0%
350	1	0%
300	1	0%
Total Result	145	100.00%

While I always do more 1000 piece puzzles than any other piece count, last year the percentage was only 51%, now up to 70%. Also, I’ve done a lot less 500-piece puzzles than in 2021, that percentage is down to 10% from 25%.

Here’s the breakdown according to brand:

brand	puzzles	%
Ravensburger	25	17%
Heye	18	12%
Tactic	13	9%
Clementoni	12	8%
Trefl	8	6%
Cobble Hill	6	4%
Schmidt	6	4%
Bluebird Puzzle	5	3%
Falcon	4	3%
Gibsons Puzzle	4	3%
Eurographics	3	2%
Grafika	3	2%
Jumbo	3	2%
Lautapelit.fi	3	2%
Piatnik	3	2%
Buffalo	2	1%
D-Toys	2	1%
Educa	2	1%
Ricordi Arte	2	1%
Sunsout	2	1%
Anatolian / Perre	1	1%
Arrow	1	1%
Art Stones	1	1%
Ass	1	1%
eeBoo	1	1%
Laurence King Publishing	1	1%
Master Pieces	1	1%
New York Puzzle Company	1	1%
NK	1	1%
Paul Lamond Games	1	1%
Peliko	1	1%
Pintoo	1	1%
Pomegranate	1	1%
Re-marks	1	1%
Spiel Spass	1	1%
The Gifted Stationary Company	1	1%
Unidragon	1	1%
White Mountain Puzzles	1	1%
Zee	1	1%
Total Result	145	100%

The top two are unchanged (although the Ravensburger percentage is down to 17% from 23% in 2021), but there’s a new number three, as Tactic has passed Clementoni. This is entirely due to the fact that I did a lot of Stenvall duck-puzzles this year, including the two most difficult in the series (both of them mostly white). If I keep it up, I’ll have gone through all the Stenvall puzzles in 2024.

One thing that I definitely failed at in 2022 was limiting acquisition of puzzles so that I would complete more puzzles than I acquired. In 2022, I acquired 197 puzzles and 187 165 pieces. That’s quite a bit more than I would ever be able to complete in a year. I’ll try to do better in 2023.

Happy New Year!

Last week, I bought a few puzzle from a recycling center. With one of the puzzles, I knew as soon as I picked it up that something was wrong – it was way too heavy. I just had to get it to find out what was in the box 🙂

The first thing I did was weigh the pieces, and then I weighed the pieces of a complete 1000 piece Clementoni puzzle (it’s a 1000 piece Clementoni box), and from that I was able to work out that there should be almost 3000 pieces in the box.

I was able to easily sort all the pieces into four piles just based on the colour on the back of the pieces:

There were small piles of grey and blue pieces, a green pile with pieces from at least two puzzles, and a large pile of light blue pieces. The light blue pieces are Clementoni pieces, and at least some of them are from the image on the box.

I tried out the grey-backed pieces first, but it wasn’t much use. From the size of the pieces, it’s very unlikely that the piece count is less than 500 pieces, and there are less than 200 pieces present, so this went into the bin pretty fast. There is some vegetation, and an animal, possibly a bird. That’s all I could make out.

Next, I tried the dark blue pieces:

Well, this is obviously an alpine landscape in autumn, but there are still a lot of pieces missing. I don’t mind missing pieces, but I want to be able to connect all the pieces that are there, you know, and that clearly wasn’t happening with this one, so it also ended up in the bin.

Next, the green pile. As I said, there were at least two puzzles in there, and one of them was of really bad quality. Not only were the pieces thin and all exactly alike, but a lot of them were actually broken:

I didn’t even try this, but went over to the other green pieces.

There are about 450 pieces here, and I was hopeful, I would be able to put this together, but I now think these pieces are from a 1000 piece puzzle, not a 500 piece puzzle. I could only find one corner piece. I can make out that there is sea, and some sails.

At this point I decided to do some other puzzles before I go on with the final, largest pile of pieces. I did another weigh-in, and there are about 1700 pieces left. They are all Clementoni pieces, and there are pieces from at least two puzzles left.

As always, I start the year by taking a statistical look back at the previous years puzzling. In 2021, I completed 96 puzzles and placed 97 529 pieces. This is down from last year, when I completed 147 puzzles and placed 125 151 pieces. This is at least partly due to the fact that I’ve been doing larger puzzles that take longer to complete, and less small puzzles (the average number of pieces for my 2021 puzzles is 1015, and for 2020 it was only 851).

The top three brands are still unchanged, although the percentaged are smaller than they used to be (last year 29%, 18% and 12%. If you count pieces instead of completed puzzles, Ravensburger is still at 29%, because all of the larger puzzles I did were from Ravensburger. The two sections I completed of the 18 000 piece puzzle are counted as two 4500 piece puzzles.

Brand	Amount	%
Ravensburger	22	23 %
Heye	11	11 %
Clementoni	8	8 %
Grafika	4	4 %
Schmidt	3	3 %
Piatnik	3	3 %
Peliko	3	3 %
Anatolian / Perre	3	3 %
Tactic	2	2 %
Cobble Hill	2	2 %
Bluebird Puzzle	2	2 %
D-Toys	2	2 %
Pomegranate	2	2 %
Eurographics	2	2 %
Gibsons Puzzle	2	2 %
Jumbo	2	2 %
Postdienst – Deutsche Bundespost	1	1 %
Pelikan	1	1 %
Galison	1	1 %
Calvendo	1	1 %
Buffalo	1	1 %
Helsingin kaupunginmuseo	1	1 %
Ricordi Arte	1	1 %
Wentworth Wooden Puzzles	1	1 %
Unknown	1	1 %
eeBoo	1	1 %
Castorland	1	1 %
Ikea	1	1 %
FX Schmid	1	1 %
Crystal Lines	1	1 %
Arrow	1	1 %
Lautapelit.fi	1	1 %
Cloudberries	1	1 %
New York Puzzle Company	1	1 %
Unidragon	1	1 %
Nyckelpussel	1	1 %
Educa	1	1 %
Otter House	1	1 %
House of Puzzles	1	1 %
Grand Total	96	100 %

Next piece count. As I said, I’ve been doing larger puzzles, and this can be seen especially in the amount of 500 piece puzzles that I’ve done – last year it was 31%, now down to 25%. The top three piece counts are unchanged from last year.

Pieces	Amount	%
1000	49	51 %
500	24	25 %
1500	7	7 %
2000	4	4 %
4500	2	2 %
387	1	1 %
291	1	1 %
759	1	1 %
368	1	1 %
400	1	1 %
250	1	1 %
555	1	1 %
5000	1	1 %
504	1	1 %
515	1	1 %
Grand Total	96	100 %

Last year, I complained that I was buying too many puzzles, much more than I completed, but I’m happy to report that 2021 was better in this respect. I acquired 83 puzzles and 92 922 pieces in 2021, and that’s 13 puzzles and 4607 pieces less than I completed / placed. I hope I can keep the balance nest year as well.

Happy New Year!

I always look out for puzzles in movies and TV-series, and recently I’ve been rewatching an old favourite of mine, Prisoner Cell Block H, an Australian series set in a women’s prison that ran from 1979 until 1986. Here we see sadistic prison guard Joan Ferguson in one of the very few story lines that shows her in a sympathetic light. Auntie Joan puzzling with the kids.

As usual, I can’t quite make out the image, but there is a side shot of the box:

So, 750 pieces, and on the right, there’s Australia. On the left, is says OZ. I tried to find out of there’s an Australian puzzle brand called OZ, but I got bogged down by all the wizards (there are a lot of Wizard of Oz-themed puzzles).

Just so as you’re not left with a false impression, here’s Joan more in her element, bashing a prisoner:

According to WordPress, I’ve now posted every day for 365 days, and I would like to thank everyone who has read or commented on this blog. I never expected to keep it up this long, in fact, I never intended to post every day at all, but I got inspired by Stacey at My Jigsaw Journal. But it was never going to be sustainable for me, and now that I’ve used all my old photos, I’m going to cut back quite a lot. I will also have less time for puzzling, as we have a big project at work that will mean long hours during the next 10 months or so. Also, I would like to read a bit more. I will still be puzzling, of course, and I’ve decided I will post every Friday, and sometimes also on Tuesday, depending on how much I’ve been puzzling.

Here’s an interesting little art project that I saw on the wall of a building in 2014 near where I live in Helsinki:

I remember seeing it a few years later, and it looked like you would expect puzzle pieces to look after being subjected to rain and snow for a while: the image layer was gone, but there was still something left of the cardboard. Unfortunately, I have no photo of that, and when I walked past the place recently, I could no longer find the spot where this was in 2014.

I’ll be back the day after tomorrow!