This week I’ve not placed many pieces, I’ve been at the Nightvisions film festival, and now I’m on my way to Dortmund, but nothing stops me buying more puzzles…
I got this second hand, but it’s still factory sealed. I feel like starting a big puzzle soon, perhaps not quite this big, but definitely something in the 4000-5000 range…
Again a puzzle that’s missing from my records, so completion date is actually the date I took the photo.
My first and so far only D-Toys puzzle. I remember I was not impressed with the quality, but now that I look at the cut it seems fine to me. They have some nice images, and someone recently praised the quality on the FB jigsaw group, so I might give this brand another go.
As for the image, I’m not a fan of the style. I may be way off, but it looks at least computer-assisted, and it definitely lacks the wonderful expressiveness of Degano, Loup or Ryba.
This is one of my favourite puzzles. I’ve completed it twice, and I expect I will do it again one day.
Some of my friends have completed it too, and strangely, some find this puzzle very hard, while I think it’s quite easy. It’s never occurred to me before that puzzle difficulty level isn’t an absolute, but that different people find different things difficult. I would love to know why this puzzle seems so much harder to some than to others.
The image on the box has faded so much that colourwise, it’s not much use anymore, but on the puzzle itself, the colours are still vibrant. Somehow you can’t see that in the photos, but the colours really look quite different on the box.
There are a number of all-black and all-white pieces, but there is so much variety in piece shape that it’s not a problem. On the photo, the black pieces are already sorted by shape.
A couple of photos from the first assembly in 2009.
I wrote earlier about the puzzles by Tactic with images by Kaj Stenvall, and I decided to try to get all of them. They are all out of print, so I’m getting them second hand, although some are still factory sealed. I’ve been able to identify 30 puzzles, two with 500 pieces and the rest with 1000 pieces. There may be more, of course, as there is no complete list by Tactic, or by anyone else that I can find.
I currently have 19 of the 30, and four more are already on the way. They are good quality, although some of them have only pieces of the basic shape with two tabs opposite.
I started on one, called Firmly on the Ground, and unfortunately, this is one of those. Some pieces were still stuck together from the previous assembly, and I’m taking advantage of that 🙂
My first and most definitely last Photomosaics puzzle. This was insanely difficult.
Every piece has an unrelated image, and the colour ties it to the macro image. The quality was great, but I’m not doing another one of these 🙂
I’ve seen at least two of these films, although I’m not a huge fan. This took longer than expected, there were a lot of dark pieces. Bought used but complete, one piece was damaged (the image layer missing from one tab). Actually, the damage almost looks like an order pinned to Norrington’s uniform.
I usually keep my beverages away from my puzzles (I’ve had several accidents over the years), but I just bought this glass mug with a lid and a straw. Should limit the damage 🙂
I started with the faces.
A Heye cartoon puzzle with a map of the European Union. My copy is from the 2007 edition, but you can tell from the image that it is older, as many countries are missing. Finland and Sweden joined the union in the mid-90s, and they are not present here. The puzzle was originally released in 1991.
Finally finished Bavaria. Dortmund is playing Bayern Munich today in a huge game that could decide the championship, so I’m hoping they will also finish Bavaria later today 🙂
Unconventional transport for tourists …
… as well as more traditional vehicles.
In the bottom right-hand corner there’s a Wagner opera in progress.
The opera set includes a model of the castle 🙂
A great puzzle, the mountains and vegetation were the hardest parts.
An image from probably the most popular German cartoonist of all time, Loriot, who died in 2011, aged 87.
The text says “The duck remains outside!”.
I don’t know how well known Loriot is outside Germany in general, but we had several books with Loriot cartoons in Swedish when I was a child, and I loved them.
The puzzle itself was otherwise easy, but I remember that the blue parts took quite some time to finish.
The image shows a scene from a story that is part of the founding myth of Rome.
While working on this I promised myself that I would no longer get a puzzle just because the image has something to do with ancient Rome or Greece. (I studied Latin and ancient Greek in my youth.) I didn’t particularly like the image, and it was also quite difficult.
From the photo, it looks like one piece is missing, but I have not recorded any missing pieces. Probably I found it after I had taken the puzzle apart 🙂
Puzzler1909 