I’ve been known to do jigsaw puzzles *face-down. *That was back in the day when I was less sane than I am now. And had a lot more time on my hands.
I’ve done that, but it has a problem when you’re dealing with the repeat-cutter kind: you end up with pieces that matched perfectly in the back, but not the front.
The biggest puzzle I’ve solved (and it was in company) was a 5K Renaissance map from Educa that was chosen by the non-puzzlers in the group, what with them being both the majority and the louder talkers; those of us who had built one before would never have gone for something that big for the purpose we had*. The puzzlers tried to get stuff organized, were ignored by the non-puzzlers, looked at each other and started working away. By the time the loudmouths realized that there might be some sort of system beyond “pick any piece and start randomly poking it against the table”, we had about 90% of the frame down.
- A friend’s wedding. We put the monetary gift in a bank account, with two signatures (the two less-bribable people in the group, among those who actually lived in town); the money could not be removed unless both signataries signed (alternatively, death certificates or doctor’s certificates of full inabilitation). The puzzle was built, the account number and a phrase written on the back, then it got disassembled and the newlyweds could not get their money until they’d built the puzzle and shown it to the two signataries.
This is brilliant. I may just have a new evil gift for my friends…
No way could I ever put that together! However,I have solved the cat problem…I work puzzles online! No puzzle pieces under the couch or eaten…
The newest Largest Jigsaw has 40,320 pieces. I don’t think it will fit on my card table.
Tough, but doable; lots of variations in color and detail.
If I had a room for it, I’d love to take that on. I love jigsaw puzzles. But I’d have to be able to close the door to prevent the kitties from having parties.
We would traditionally get a puzzle for Christmas and spend the holiday working on it. One was only 1,000 pieces but it was a star field photo taken through a telescope. Some of the brighter stars were labeled with their names and the constellation boundaries had been added but an awful lot of the pieces were just black with a star or two on it. My two young nephews declared it was “impossible” to complete the thing but we said, no, just tedious. Took about three days.
Two even larger puzzles are now out there.
This puzzle from Educa has 42,000 pieces. That’s 1680 more pieces than the previous largest puzzle posted about here.
But wait! The French puzzlemaker Grafika is now offering a 48,000 piece monster. 55 pounds of puzzle. Wow.
Yeah, but I think they’re sort of cheating, since the puzzle comes as “X bags of Y pieces.” Like the latter one – 24 bags of 2000 pieces, and the image clearly divides into an 8 by 3 grid. Seems more like solving 24 SEPARATE 2000 piece puzzles that just happen to have borders that interlock.
Nothing prevents the solver from emptying all 24 bags into the box and stirring them around, although that’s not a decision to take lightly.
Educa Puzzles in Spain will actually replace lost or damaged pieces. We recently had a multi-thousand piece puzzle on the table that my wife and I completed after 11 months labor. During that time one piece tore, another was chewed up by the dog, and a third disappeared. After sending coordinates for the pieces to Educa, a month later the three replacement pieces arrived in the mail to finish the puzzle. This would seem an essential feature for larger puzzles that might stay in a table for years until completion.
Thanks for the link! I’ve done the 6,000 piece world map puzzle on that page - it took me a year, all of the table in our sun room, and my wife almost killed me before I was done.
I’m working on a paper/article on the mathematics of solving jigsaw puzzles, which analytically shows why certain solving strategies are better than others.
I’m revising now, I’ll put it on Google docs and send a link if anyone is interested.
I’m too backed up in > 2,000 piece puzzles to even consider getting a really big one. Plus I doubt I’ll live long enough to finish it.
Is that the same work that you mentioned seven years ago, when this thread was first active? It sounds like you write for publication at about the same rate that I do.
One key, I’ve found, is that it varies tremendously depending on the design of the puzzle. There are grids, approximate grids, and gridless, square pieces and rectangular pieces, differences in the proportions or even presence of different innie-outie configurations, variations in whether the pieces all interlock or not, and so on. Plus, of course, various sorts of cues and clues from the image.
For instance, the last puzzle I did, for the “sky” section at the end, most but not all of the pieces were the standard innie-outie-innie-outie shape. Which means that a crystallographic approach is possible. I separated out the nonstandard pieces into (mostly) two piles: One of innie-innie-innie-outie pieces, and one of outie-outie-outie-innie pieces (plus a few innie^4 and outie^4, and a few innie-innie-outie-outies). I then looked for places in the puzzle where there were extra innies or outies along the edges of the open space: An extra innie is usually matched by an outie^3-innie piece, and vice-versa, to restore the regular pattern. Occasionally I’ve seen the big open area divide into two mostly-regular regions with the opposite innie-outie orientation from each other; this means that there must be a domain boundary between those two regions composed entirely of nonstandard shapes, and so I try to find those. Once I’ve got that done, the extra-innie pieces will mostly match up with the extra-outie pieces, to make standard duos.
For images, personally, I prefer photographs, because they usually have more fine detail (though if you’re going to go with a painting for a mega-puzzle, Bosch is an excellent choice). I like ones that have a combination of natural and man-made features, like a village nestled in an Alpine valley: The straight edges of man-made features make for a good framework to fit the rest together.
It’s interesting the different types of puzzles there are, and why people prefer one type to another. A lot of natural landscapes drive me nuts because there are usually large areas, like blue sky, with so little pictorial detail that all there is to go by is the shape of the pieces. Good job on figuring out a logical trick to help with that.
When I was a kid I liked jigsaw puzzles with somewhat artificial images, like cartoon characters or mosaics of candy wrappers or license plates. One of my favorites was of a Monopoly board. There was enough color or details that I could tell which pieces would fit together even before I tried them. I suppose I still like puzzles like that.
This is still the largest I’ve ever done. Lots of detail and color, but still pretty damn hard. Biotop’s link includes this monster, which looks doable, but check out the picture of the woman sitting on the puzzle to get a hint at what you’re really in for.
Jeez, I thought of it that long ago? But I have written it up, first draft, just recently. No time before I retired. I can write faster for publication - I can knock off a 550 word column in an hour when I get inspiration.
Yeah, I cover that. The key is how easy it is to filter for possible matches. Some of the nastier puzzles have pieces of one basic shape, so you have to filter by subtle differences in the size of knobs and blanks. I treat shapes and colors/patterns in separate sections.
I do something similar. The technical term for innies is blank, and for outies is knob.
One of the reasons that wooden puzzles are so much fun is that since you have the neat figure pieces you can’t sort pieces by any kind of shape. It is actually harder than non-interlocking puzzles.
I’m fond of maps. I have tons of city street maps and state road maps. I’ve done a bunch more of the historical city 4D puzzles since I posted last - the ones where you build the city and then put in buildings. I redid the Hong Kong one after I went there, and it made a lot more sense. We stayed just beyond the lower left of the puzzle, and it was fun to find the streets we walked on.
BTW https://www.puzzlewarehouse.com/daily-puzzle/ has a bunch of free puzzles, some of which I’ve done in real life. I can knock them off in the hardest setting in under 10 minutes. There is also a Microsoft Jigsaw app which has a bunch of free puzzles of up to a couple of hundred pieces but also daily challenges.
Bumping this thread to announce that my article got finished (finally) and published on a jigsaw hobby site.
It has already gotten four times the hits of her normal puzzle review.
Congratulations.
Not familiar with some of the math notation. Example “since – + 1 pieces have been placed”
Or ,-1.+,–2.+…1.-2
Brian