Most of the other sites I have found are either silly or too easy to work. So if you know of places at least as good as those first three above, please share.
Second, for those of you who enjoy solving such puzzles. please solve today’s at
and then tell me if you can see what the description says is there. It reminds me of the photos some people take where there’s a person at some distance from the camera holding something in his or her hand and the caption on the photo says something to make you think the person taking the picture wanted you to recognize or at least see what the person was holding.
Third, do you have any interesting things to share about jigsaw puzzles in general. Any jigsaw puzzle jokes? Any special pictures you have turned into a jigsaw puzzle? The biggest or most complicated real-life jigsaw puzzle you have worked? Have you ever done one of those 1,000+ piece puzzles where there’s no picture? Something even weirder than that?
Or anything else that would include the words “jigsaw puzzle” in the sentence(s)?
I did that puzzle this morning, but I always do those without looking at the picture first. Once I finished and saw the caption, I found the subject, but it didn’t exactly jump out at me.
I never see the caption until after working the puzzle. Nine times out of ten I’m pleased to know what it is/was that I was working on, and maybe half the time I have a good idea what’s going to be there just from the preview picture.
Today’s was just a bunch of leaves on the ground, as best I could tell. Once I saw there was supposed to be a mouse, I had to look carefully to try to find it. Am I right that it’s a little left of center and smaller than the leaves? Kinda gray in color?
As John Travolta says to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, “What a gyp!”
So, Robot Arm, do you have another puzzle site you can recommend?
I don’t know if it’s my computer or that site or what, but what a pain in the ass. Moving the pieces was on a severely delayed reaction and every move gave me the spinning color wheel that makes you wait (on a PC it would be the hourglass). Not to mention that there’s not nearly enough room on the “table” to lay all the unused pieces out so that you can SEE them. Since there’s no way to play without pieces overlapping each other, and with movement soooooooooooooooo slowwwwwwwwwwww, I gave up after completing the border and adding just a few inner pieces and clicked on ‘solve’. Saw the mousie right away. It was cute. But that puzzle site sucks.
That’s ok - not your fault, of course. Maybe my computer was just being futzy with me. I’ve got a jigsaw puzzle spread out all over my kitchen table right now, and there’s a method to my madness in solving them, so perhaps the fact that I couldn’t do the same with the online version contributed to my frustration. But it was seriously slow, and not being able to see all the pieces and their shapes made it impossible to finish.
As for the mousie, I love images like that. Here’s one I took on our honeymoon up in Big Bear. Now that’d be a great photo to turn into a puzzle!
It’s a shame the site wasn’t working for you. It works okay for me; no delays while moving objects.
It is a little tight for space. If it gets too crowded, I’ll put pieces with a similar color or pattern in a pile and work on them later.
Cool picture ("…and that, class, is why lizards are brown. Any questions?"), but it would be a damn hard jigsaw puzzle. (In real life, at least. I can do any puzzle at that shockwave site in 20 minutes, max.)
You took a picture of a lizard while on your honeymoon?
Once upon a time I was very into jigsaw puzzles. One of my favorites at the time were those who have the same image printed on the reverse so a 1000 piece puzzle is now 2000. Since there is no “back”, the pieces have to be rotated and reversed to fit. Fun fun.
I’ve never tried the online versions. I’m gonna go check out a couple of your links now.
In other jigsaw-related news, my husband did one with the same identical pattern of dalmatian puppies on both sides. I think it was 500 pieces. It looked darn near impossible.
I agree with Shayna; the site is fun, but the inability to spread out the pieces is a serious handicap.
My dad and I are puzzle fiends. Anything less than 1000 pieces had better be pretty tricky in its own right. I particularly like Impossibles puzzles: repeating images in various sizes and orientations, and the final picture is not necessarily exactly as it looks on the box; no flat-edge pieces, and 5 extra pieces that don’t fit anywhere.
I never found double-sided puzzles to be very challenging; it’s usually pretty easy to tell which side was up when the puzzle was cut.
When I was a kid, I used to have a few Schmuzzle puzzles, where all the pieces are the same shape (lizards or turtles based on Escher’s tiled lizard pictures), and can fit together any which way (though only one correct way). Let me tell you, large expanses of sky are hard in those!
I do tons of puzzles, but I’m not very fond of on-line ones, since since they don’t have that nice feel of real ones. I also do them while watching tv, so I don’t really waste time. I’ve got the disks of the Puz-3D puzzles, which are pretty good, and have lots of nice extras, but it still is hard to find the time.
Biggest one - a 7,000 piecer of an old world map, which took most of a year and an entire large table. My wife has made it very clear that I can’t use up that much space (but when I retire.) I’ve also done the multi-thousand puzz3D one of New York City.
We have a thrift shop near us which usually has a nice collection of interesting ones, for from 99 cents to $2.99. I got a Puzz3D of San Francisco there, list price $60, for $10. At the rate I go through them, I need to get them cheap. Unless they are ones I collect (Norman Rockwell, New York, maps, Space themes, pre-Hallmark Springboks) I put them out when done. Since we live across the street from a school, they go fast.
