A Finnish Facebook group that I’m in does a yearly puzzle challenge. There’s a list with 30 items, and you should complete one puzzle for each item. There is no prize, or indeed any rules, you can decide for yourself if you want to count the same puzzle for different categories, and items can be loosely interpreted. For example, item #1, Human anatomy, is probably going to be sugar skulls for me 🙂

Anyway, here’s the list for 2024:

1. Human anatomy

2. Jetty

3. Dream

4. Gradient

5. A Pearl in my collection

6. Fruit

7. Africa

8. Party

9. Done without looking at the image

10. Pieces are smaller than usual

11. The puzzle somehow illustrates my personality or me

12. My favourite brand

13. Moonlight

14. Fox

15. Religious building

16. Game

17. Disney/Fantasy

18. (Vintage) Educational poster

19. Yellow

20. Vehicle that I’ve travelled in

21. Vehicle that I’ve never travelled in / would like to travel in

22. Thre are letters in the puzzle

23. Out of the comfort zone

24. Fits no item on the list

25. At least one piece missing

26. Shaped puzzle

27. Forest

28. 2 puzzles from the same series (1)

29. 2 puzzles from the same series (2)

30. A puzzle released in 2024

Last year, I finished the challenge in March, I think, but I plan on going much slower this year 🙂

In addition, there’s a monthly extra challenge, and for January that is “dragon”.

Almost a year ago now, I started on a box containing pieces from more than one puzzle. You can read about it here. Where I left off was with about 1700 pieces from at least two puzzles left, and I thought they were all Clementoni pieces, but I was wrong about that, as it turned out.

To examine what was left, I spread out the pieces and pulled all of the edge pieces. I noticed that some of the pieces had a shiny finish, and the corner pieces (there were two, bottom left in the photo) had a sharp angle, whereas Clementonis always have slightly rounded corners.

Here are the rest of the corner pieces that I found, they all look like Clemenoni pieces:

Five corner pieces, so at least two puzzles. None of these pieces, however, belong to the puzzle that should be in the box. Here is the box image:

It’s called Walk to Dance, and there are definitely pieces belonging to it in the box. I pulled the edge pieces that look like they might be from this puzzle:

That’s only 49 pieces, and there should be 126. Based on this, there are about 40% of the pieces that should be here, and that’s too little for me to attempt the puzzle.

There were pieces of at least four puzzles left in the box, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more. None of the puzzles seemed to have enough pieces to make it worth it to actually do the puzzle, but I still enjoyed working all this out. Also, the image is really nice, and if I come across it another time, I might well buy it again.

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!