Cartoon image with lots of funny details. I did end up using the box image quite a lot, but it was still fun and quite fast.
There’s a multipurpose sports arena, where they seem to be playing American football, soccer, basket ball, golf, baseball and either tennis or badminton, all at the same time:
The local restaurant offers take-away pizza:
Not sure why, but I expected this to be pretty easy. Well, it wasn’t, but it was pleasantly challenging from start to finish, and took me a good long while to complete.
There has been very little puzzling going on this month, I’m afraid, but this was an absolute pleasure. I’m not sure why, but I was a little suspicious of Aquarius, but based on this one puzzle, it seems to be an excellent brand. The pieces are thick and sturdy, and the cut is a grid cut with a good mix of piece shapes. I was prepared to put up with subpar quality, since a collage of horror movies is pretty much the best puzzle image I can think of, but happily, I didn’t have to.
I have a DVD box set of Hammer films, and many of the films in the puzzles are included.
There was also a couple of extra pieces in the box:
The pieces fit with the image in the top row, but they were clearly meant to be discarded (and most of them were).
I loved doing this! There were strong colours and a space theme, and even some text, although it’s so small that I can hardly read it. This was a Eurographics puzzle manufactured in Europe, but with a grid cut (previous European Eurographics have been random cut). There was a good mix of piece shapes and the cut was excellent, so no complaints.
In the image, each planet gets its own pane, and on the far right, there’s the sun, on the far left, a pane for dwarf planets. Here’s a close-up of Earth and Mars:
Another Zozoville puzzle, this time not belonging to me, but loaned to be by friends. This was lovely, and quite easy to do. Notice how the tooth that’s come out also looks happy 🙂
Another adorable Zozoville monster. Like most of the Zozoville puzzles, this was pleasantly challenging. I did the monster first, then the sea, and finally the sand.
This was something different! A wooden Ravensburger puzzle. It’s manufactured in Poland, and it turned out to be very similar to the Trefl wooden puzzles. The cut is excellent, and the puzzle was a complete joy to put together. The pieces are a bit thinner than some premium brands, like Artifact, and they are also smaller (the finished puzzle is 40×27 cm, when a cardboard 500 piece Ravensburger is 49×36 cm), but the fit is great, and the price was very reasonable – I paid 24 EUR for this.
Here’s a close-up of the cut:
There were 40 whimsies, and with the exception of the wizard hat, I think every item can be found in the puzzle itself:
The owl whimsy is even part of the owl:
On the back, there was a pattern, similar to patterns on Trefl wooden puzzles:
It occurred to me that this sort of pattern would be really useful with a puzzle with an ambiguous cut, but it’s not at all needed with an excellent cut like this. Too bad the puzzles that need this never have it.
This was a Destiny Wasgij, where you see a scene from the past and puzzle a contemporary image. I have to say, the puzzle image didn’t have much to do with the box image, and I was almost finished when I worked out the idea of the puzzle image. If you want to see the finished image, you can click here.
Fantasy type image, although it seems more like the four seasons than the four realms. On the left, it is clearly winter on top, and an autumnal scene below. Not sure which is summer and which spring on the right though. The winter pieces were the easiest to pick out, but turned out to be the hardest to put together, so that I pulled them first but ended up doing that section section last.
Quality was, again, top notch. I’m getting more and more fond of the rather tight fit that Schmidt has nowadays, it’s very satisfying when putting the puzzle together, but a bit of a pain while taking it apart.
Here it’s pretty clear what is happening: the duck wants a bath, but there is no water. The title in Finnish is “Ei pisaraakaan”, which (for once) has exactly the same meaning as the English title.
There are no dates on the puzzles, I only know what year the paintings are from, but the older puzzles have normal sized boxes, and the newer smaller boxes. This was one of the newer ones (just so we’re clear, they have all been out of print for years), and unfortunately, the quality is not as good as with the older puzzles. I’m pretty sure that there is still an error in the white wall, because I had to use force to get the last piece in. I did try to find the wrongly placed piece, but couldn’t see it, so I’m calling it done. I had a few other problems with false fits, but managed to sort them out. This was the worst quality duck puzzle so far.
Puzzler1909 