Great image again in the Zozoville series, but this time the background was really difficult. This took me an entire week to complete, although it’s partly because it’s very hot in Finland right now, and my small mobile AC can just about cope with keeping my bedroom tolerable. This week, I have spent more time in my cool bedroom watching the tennis in Wimbledon than puzzling in my hot livingroom.

This was the first of this years Heye’s, and the cut is different than what I’ve seen from Heye before. Some of the tabs are round, and some are slightly pointy – very similar to Wasgij pieces, in fact. While most of the puzzle was a normal grid cut with rows and columns matching up perfectly:

there were also some ribbon cut areas thrown in:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen (of at least noticed) types of cut being mixed like this, usually it’s one or the other. Anyway, the pieces were nice, and they definitely use the same material for the image layer as before, it felt like a Heye. There was one big problem, though. I had two false fits, both with three points of contact. Only the fact that I couldn’t find the following piece told me that it had to be wrong, but it looked really good. This is very unfortunate, as I rate precision of the cut above pretty much all else in determining the quality of a puzzle.

Another adorable Zozoville monster. I was expecting this to be more difficult than it was, it turned out to be pretty easy.

Love the rat (?) making a sketch of the main character:

I finally managed to finish the Caesar puzzle, and I have to say, the audience was really difficult. I would have preferred to have something easier waiting for me when I got back from Dortmund this time, but I was too stubborn to start anything else before this was finished. There’s one piece missing, but it’s impossible to see from this photo (it’s in the shadowy part of the image).

There seems to be both gladiatorial combat and chariot races in progress. In reality, these two forms of entertainment actually belong in different venues, chariot races in the circus and gladiatorial combat in the amphitheater. Not sure if the audience used to throw water melons at contestants 🙂

The emperor looks bored.

Some of the wild beasts were in trouble…

… while others were doing just fine.

The puzzle is from 2004, and it’s excellent quality with a great fit. The arena part was great fun, but the audience was a bit too difficult. Still, I’m really glad that I got to do this puzzle, I thought I had missed the train on this one.

My first of the new Heyes from this year. This was one of the very few Marino Degano-puzzles that I’ve found to be just OK, instead of wonderful.

Almost the same image has previously been released as Pin-Up (1500 pieces), although there were some post me-too additions, like this:

This was a nice and reasonably easy 500 pieces. I was kind of surprised to see what looks like a medieval cathedral in Manhattan, but there actually is a church built in the Gothic style there.

I am back in Dortmund for a week (there’s a game on Sunday), but before I left, I finished another adorable monster from the Zozoville series. I was expecting the fur to be really difficult, but it wasn’t too bad. In fact, this was very enjoyable from start to finish, not least because of the great quality.

Lovely image by Loup in panorama format. It turned out to be a bit more difficult than I had anticipated, but it was still fun.