We usually have one going at all times over the winter months. I just cracked open the number one rated puzzle from this site, which ranks the top 18 best 1000 piece puzzles. This is it:
The manufacturer is ArtMooon and it seems pretty high quality, although the pieces seem to be a tad smaller than usual.
This is the one I just completed:
This one, made by White Mountain, pissed me off because it came with 80 extra (duplicate) pieces, which is more aggravating than it might sound.
Anyway, once I get on a roll it is often difficult to pull myself away from a good puzzle, not unlike the Dope.
It would seem I am not the puzzle manufacturer’s base. I prefer puzzles that are photos, not paintings. And the image is what drives what puzzle I pick, not the level of difficulty.
I don’t like puzzles that are designed to be hard work (solid or near-solid color or ones where the image is picked to be repetitive). I am frustrated by the recent trend in 1000 piece puzzles. It seems that for puzzles where I like the image, the choices are either 1000 piece or 36 piece “Alzheimer’s” puzzles designed to help with brain processing. Since I don’t have it, 36 piece puzzles are a bit easy for me.
And I HATE the trend not just for paintings, but for paintings of real things that could be photographed, made by people that have no grasp of proportion or vanishing points!
What the hell is going on here? The 32 looks like it is doing a wheelie with all four wheels on the ground. The 58 is an alien spacecraft in a warp distortion field. Neither use the same VP as the building, which itself has two contradictory VPs.
I’ve loved them since I was a child. I can remember one particular friend and I sitting for hours working on a picture of a hamburger with all the fixings.
“this looks like a piece of the lettuce” “where’s the rest of the tomato?”
I don’t have a lot of room to spare for something that will take up space on my table for a week but I would sacrifice that if I could find one suitable for hanging when it’s finished. I can’t view @Mean_Mr.Mustard 's photos but I will look up ArtMoon.
This is the toughest puzzle my wife and I ever completed. We threatened to quit and reclaim the living room many times. But the reward when finished was worth it.
I like virtual puzzles on my tablet. My cat is overly “helpful”, so physical puzzle pieces would quickly become kitty toys, then get lost or chewed past usability.
My wife bought me a 2000 pc puzzle of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” for my birthday back at the end of October. I’m maybe halfway done with it. It’s taking up about half of the bedroom I use as a home office. It is without a doubt the hardest puzzle I have worked on. I usually do 500 pc puzzles that I can complete in a weekend.
Have a grand boss that liked to do team building exercises.
One was we broke up to small teams of 3 people each, made about 5 ‘sub’ teams. Each small team got a jigsaw puzzle. About 25 pieces. The first to team to complete the puzzle ‘won’.
What was not disclosed was that the each team had two puzzle pieces from another teams puzzle.
We had to puzzle it out. That was the real puzzle.
“Anybody got a tree? I’ve got a city piece that I don’t need, My puzzle is a mountain”
And, as @Seanette says, the pieces don’t get lost.
We have several puzzles but they’re currently relegated to the closet due to a lack of space and three cats. I have Ravensburger’s app on my PC plus several online at Jigidi.
I’m not a puzzler myself but I’m fascinated by people who are able to do it. The old guy who serves as security for our church, whose name is Gary, does puzzles all the time and puts them on the walls of the church’s gaming room.
I love the Easter Egg and television ones you showed.
I am an avid user of the Microsoft Jigsaw puzzle app on my laptop. I prefer photos, because I find that paintings lack resolution. I always do highest number of pieces, 600 or 588. Weaknesses with the app are: all of the pieces are oriented properly, no need to twist pieces around to find the proper orientation, background tabletop color selection is limited and often not useful.
I do occasionally do a IRL puzzle, but I don’t have a dedicated space to work on one. Any future home will have a space to keep a puzzle in progress at all times.
We do puzzles casually as a group. We usually look for easier puzzles with some defined colors, textures or spaces so people can work a “thing”. 500 pieces is good for a night. 1000 pieces for a weekend. We’ve been really enjoying the illustrated Dowdle ones lately.
Many years ago, my mother gave me a jigsaw puzzle that was a tray full of candied apples with sticks in them. It was basically near-identical apples with sticks. It was an unholy bitch to do. Halfway through, I realized that the picture on the cover was a mirror image of the actual puzzle. That pissed me off even more.
I don’t have the room for any real life puzzles. I do jigidi a lot. I can’t do awfully big ones, because they’re too hard to see on my screen, but I don’t mind doing smaller ones. And I like to work them when I’m listening to the news – I need the distraction.
Since I retired we’ve had a puzzle going most of the time in the dining room. We’re from the “don’t look at the picture after buying” camp, so they usually last three or four weeks before we grab another one. And some times we leave it alone for a while, and then other times we get hooked and work at it for hours some days.
I do tons, mostly gotten from thrift stores. (And I donate the finished ones back.) I’m working through my backlog of 2,000 piece puzzles, and have done a couple of 3,000 piece ones. I have two 5,000 and one 4,000 ones in my office, ready to go. I do them while watching TV.
I have an article/paper on the mathematics of puzzles. I can’t find it any more in the jigsaw hobbyist site, but it got printed in Linda Richard’s book “There’s More to Jigsaw Puzzles than Pieces.” It’s called “The Mathematics of Jigsaw Puzzles.” It got found by someone from the BBC who consulted with me on whether the statement in a script from a Father Brown spinoff about puzzle complexity was correct. (It got held up by the pandemic, I haven’t noticed it as being available yet.)
I use the Microsoft app also - on my PC. I do the daily challenge every day, which gives me enough app gold to buy their puzzles, which I do sometimes while listening to podcasts or streams that could be podcasts. But I much prefer real puzzles.
I’ve done the TV one in the OP, and am working on an old Impossibles puzzle (no border, a few extra piece, picture is of flowers) that has been in my puzzle box for a decade.
I’m not but my daughter is, she’s loved them since she could muster the motor skills to pick up a piece.
The other thing is, she is scary good at them. Far better than anyone else in the family. Fast to the point of sarcasm and parody. She loves the big 3000 piece Ravensburger ones.
And I wonder, she’s always been a naturally talented artist (and no-one else in the family is) so does one follow the other? are they related in some way?
