We did our first round one at Thanksgiving. Doing the edge first (mom’ll have an aneurism if we don’t) was hard, because you don’t know the radius. You think you’ve got it done and you find two more edge pieces hours later, which changes other things.
Ah! That’s exactly what this one has and I had to use it to put the edge together.
A good puzzle, of any shape, shouldn’t have any false fits (unless that’s the whole point of the puzzle, and it’s all false fits). Some might be close, but you should always be able to tell the difference.
*I have seen some puzzles based on Escher’s lizards, or slightly morphed into turtles, where all of the non-edge pieces were the same shape, and hence interchangeable. One that I had was hot-air balloons, and doing the sky part was nearly impossible (there were enough color gradations to tell when it was wrong, but not where the right piece was).
The number of false fits is directly proportional to your determination and thumb strength, IME. I have a tiny (10x15 centimeter) 150 piece puzzle of Monet’s “Water Lilies” - the tabs are maybe 3 mm across, so between the size and the painting it’s almost impossible to tell if the piece actually fits or not. They printed wavy lines on the back, so I had to use that a lot to see if the pieces were really in the right locations.
And missing pieces are the worst. Totally ruins the sense of satisfaction when you finish a puzzle.
We are currently working a 4000 piece puzzle from Educa (Spain) that is full of false fits with much of the coloring hard to distinguish (mountain shadows color almost exactly the same as sky color, for example). Pieces fit for a while and then whole sections have to be reworked. ALL of the non-border pieces are the same traditional two prongs/two hole type. Every one. We pretty much thought the task undoable and non-fun… and yet two months later with two thirds complete with most of the fit pieces probably in the right spot I have to say this puzzle has been a unique and not altogether awful experience. When we finish, and we will finish barring the cat knocking off a huge section again, this will be one to remember.
We have done other puzzles from this company and never had this trouble. The box really should have had a warning label. 
I suppose that when you get to a large enough number of pieces, avoiding false fits gets harder.
One thing that I find helps is looking at the back of a pair of pieces (even when the backs are completely unmarked). It’s often easier to see if the backs match than the fronts, since the cutting produces a slight bevel on the front that makes the shapes a little vaguer.
I look at the back and also hold it up to the light to see if any light gets through.
The largest puzzle I ever did was 5,000 pieces from Ravensburger. It did have some false fits, and I figured out why. If I took a piece out, and moved it a certain distance right or left, I would find the exact same shape. The whole cutting pattern repeated. I’m sure the cutter was round and rolled across the puzzle like a rolling pin. The pattern was 1/3 the width of the puzzle, so every shape (neglecting the edges) occurred 3 times.
The picture had enough details that getting the pieces in the right places wasn’t a problem. There were some red curtains along the top where the color was similar or else I never would have noticed the pattern.
The office where I used to work brough in some puzzles for the break room. I discoverd that some were from the same company, and must have been stamped by the same cutter. I could take a piece from one puzzle and it fit in the same location in another.
They were called Shmuzzle Puzzles. Here’s a page of them from EBay
I had a few of them like 30 years ago.
I don’t think the cutter was round. More likely, I think it was just a big flat rectangle, and they picked up the rectangle and moved it over to a different section of the puzzle and stamped it down again. Probably the biggest die-stamp they have is sized appropriately for a 1000-piece puzzle or so.
I had a 2000-piece puzzle I did where the column of pieces right down the middle were all narrower than the rest of the puzzle, and in some cases had cuts that were way too close together, or even slightly overlapping. There, they must not have quite moved the die over far enough.
And puzzle companies using the same die repeatedly for different puzzles, so you can put the corresponding pieces from one puzzle in a different one, is well known. A couple of years ago there was a thread around here about someone creating art, by selectively replacing parts of one puzzle with a different puzzle. It was an interesting effect.
I got a pretty good score today. A vintage (2004) Ravensburger puzzle for $5 on marketplace. It’s only sold in Europe and it’s from the Star Line series which glows in the dark. They come up on ebay now and then for about $60.
My wife got a jigsaw puzzle with numbers on the back. I’d never seen that before. Of course a “lively” discussion broke out over whether this was ‘fair’ (assuming this is what they are for).
Any thoughts about these numbers?
A good puzzle shouldn’t need those numbers.
But not all puzzles are good, and some bad ones need them.
One example, somewhere or another I have a spherical jigsaw puzzle of a globe. Obviously, perfect fits aren’t possible for that, since it had to be made in separate segments. And a lot of the planet is ocean, so you can’t tell if you have the right fit by the picture, either. The numbers on the back were the only real way of doing much of that one.
I got in the habit of working jigidi puzzles when I’m “watching” news programs on TV. It helps keep my blood pressure down.
Oh, I didn’t know this thread existed!
Puzzles and podcasts have been my latest self care thing. I’ve completed 9 over the last year. I tend to favor 1500 to 2000 pieces, but I change it up with 1,000ers too.
Right now I’m working on a 1,000 piece Christmas one I got on discount, but I’m not thrilled about the colors.
I like to challenge myself by doing them without looking at the picture. This year my husband got me one and he hid the box so I didn’t know what it was at all until I put it together.
It is a 1,000 piece puzzle from Cross & Glory which has a lot of cool images to choose from. And I have done some tricky puzzles this year but this was the hardest one I’ve ever done! Highly recommended.
What is it about you and octopuses ?!
btw folks, Jigidi now allows you to change the number of pieces into
which the jigsaws are divided ! So if you like the picture but your device
is too small for 600 pieces, you can change it to something more
manageable.
I like all things tentacled, particularly cephalopods, but there are more octopus things you can find in the world than squid things or cuttlefish things, so people latch onto that when they get me stuff.
One of my friends once remarked, “I find a new octopus every time I come to your house.”
I do in fact love them, but I love a lot of sea creatures, from sea slugs to jellyfish, so hopefully I’ll find some good puzzles with other kinds of critters too.
Thank you! That’s very thoughtful.
Woo hoo! 3 months and almost 4000 nearly identical pieces. We finally finished this. The last few days involved pulling out white mountain pieces and re-fitting them elsewhere to try and make it all work. I don’t think I’d ever want to tackle such a puzzle again because of the seemingly endless false fits.
And yet when we finally got it right, I gotta say, super fun!