I’m truly addicted to the damn things. I do them while watching TV, on a puzzle board my father in law made me sitting on a coffee table in the living room.
We have a thrift shop near us with an excellent collection of puzzles for between 99 cents and $2.99 each, which lets me feed my addiction without going broke. My current one is a Ravensberger puzzle of that famous black and white picture of a bunch of construction guys sitting on a girder resting high above the city.
Anyone else do 3D puzzles also? I’ve got a ton of them, mostly bought used also.
The biggest was one of the lower end of New York City, with all the famous buildings - 3,000 pieces, I think.
I have the rollup one, but unless your puzzle is mostly done, it doesn’t do a good job keeping things together. I think the other two would work better so long as there is a nice, snug, cover. I have a platform without one, it is ok but hard to move the puzzle.
Computer puzzles don’t do it for me, since there isn’t that same tactile pleasure, and because I can’t do it watching TV. I do have the Wrebbit 3D computer puzzles. I finished Notre Dame and Orient Express, and have the Victorian House partially done. Those are fun since the come with extras like clips giving the history, and let you move around inside the puzzle once you are done.
I only take the pieces I’m working on out of the box. My wife likes to dump them all which is very messy. Our dog likes munching on pieces, so too many out increases the probability she gets one. (The dog, not my wife.)
I see the appeal of starting in the middle, and I’ve done that when the frame is boring and the picture is interesting, but usually I start with the frame while I consider my strategy.
I’ve done the old Springbok “Little Red Riding Hood’s Hood” - circular and all red. I’ve done a puzzle flipped over. The worst was when I was in college and did the puzzle starting from the bottom left corner and doing it row by row in order. Once was enough for that.
Y’all are amazing. I only like them if they fit well together (so in other words, the cheap ones are too difficult), have less than 500 pieces, are a relatively larger size and are extremely easy. I can’t do the ones with funky boarders, lots of one color or have gazillions of pieces to save my life. Ugh.
Oh, as for method, I usually do the frame first, then any sort of writing that might be present, then look for linear features that span a large part of the picture (roads, power lines, boundaries between areas of different color, etc.), then look for small regions with distinctive colors or textures (clouds, a large shingled roof, etc.). Occasionally, when I’m stumped, I’ll take pieces out of the box, figure out where they are on the picture, and put them on the table in the approximate correct position (this was critical for the soup-can one I just did). I usually have two or three categories of pieces I’m interested in at a time, and those will be in separate piles on the table, but all other pieces stay in the box. I don’t even worry about turning pieces face-up in the box until I’m almost done, when they can all fit in a couple of layers in the bottom of the box.
I’ve always been interested in those gigantic 18000-piece puzzles (typically a world map), but my wife is not a puzzler, alas. Has anyone ever done one of those behemoths?
I had that puzzle! I tried it once, then my mother lent it to a friend and it never came back. It is the one failure in my jigsaw puzzle career and haunts me to this day.
If you find it, let me know. Maybe we can talk a deal.
I really like that “Views of Modern Rome” one. It’s huge, but with enough detail to still be interesting. It took me a month, but the circumstances were unusual. I had just moved into a new place and couldn’t get my stuff delivered for about a month. I had a mattress, a pillow, a blanket, and that jigsaw puzzle.
And I like the picture. Once the rules of perspective were discovered, that artist played with them like a new release of Guitar Hero. He did three other paintings very similar to the one in the puzzle, with differences like the foreground characters and the details of the columns and windows. Or the four, I’ve seen two of them.
The antique maps seem like a good choice for big puzzles; enough detail to make it not quite impossible. I always thought this one looked tempting, but it’s been discontinued.
Why they are hard: http://www.puzzlehouse.com/_jigsaws/woodensilhouette.htm
inside pieces with a straight edge
outside pieces without a straight edge
corner pieces without a right angle corner
plus several “whimsies” per puzzle (e.g. a piece shaped like a dog)
I love to do a puzzle from time to time, but there is no way I’m going to be able to do one while my cats are still this young. About 20% of the pieces would be chewed beyond recognition and another 20% would be missing forever.
I still have one puzzle that I completely gave up on after some months - M.C. Escher’s Relativity. Something about the lack of color and the repeating images made it just feel impossible to me.
It is a chain called Thrift Town - it does support a charity. There is no guarantee that no pieces are missing, but for $.99 I’ll take that risk - it’s not like I’m going to frame the thing. They do sell some sealed puzzles. You also have to take what they have, but their stock often goes beyond the standard farmhouse and field ones.
We like Thrift Town because it is huge and their stock rotates very quickly. There are other thrift shops with only a few puzzles, if any at all, so not all are this good. I wouldn’t buy a present there (my wife does buy them for me for presents) but if you do as many as I do, and are as addicted, it keeps things under control.
I’ve seen that one. It’s a tiny cheat, being actually 4 4500 piece puzzles ( unless you mix the pieces together :eek: ) but it certainly is appealing. But I think I’d go with View of Modern Rome first.
However, after several uncontrolled thrift shop visits and Christmas I have enough backlog in a box in my garage to keep me busy for a year, not even counting the random undone ones in various closets. I’ve taken to putting completed ones I don’t intend to collect out at the curb for people to pick up. We live across from an elementary school, so they go fast.
I have several English wooden puzzles, all of which have amusing internal pieces. $50 for a 250 piece wooden puzzle of high quality is not a bad price. I did find a 200 piece wooden one in Half Price Books for $5, which was a hell of a steal - I haven’t done it yet, so I can’t say how good it is.
Buffalo Games at one time did mystery puzzles - not a murder mystery plot, but a puzzle of an office building, or hospital or beach, where there were identical blocks of four pieces, and the placement of the pieces depending on logic. One was a literal building - you built the puzzle around the box it came in. I have had one which was an undersea scene which wrapped around, so there was no left or right edge - it could start at any arbitrary column. As a kid I had one of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, a pretty big one where none of the internal pieces interlocked. That was a killer.
My family used to have a few puzzles of the front page of the New York Times–I loved doing those. One had the headline about Lindbergh’s flight, one was the abdication of Edward VIII, and one was the conclusion of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War.
I still have a few good ones that I bought back around 1980, probably from Hallmark: a black cat against a black background, a glass apple on a red background, and one of a shiny trumpet reflecting sheet music.
I hadn’t seen the abdication one. I’ve also done the sinking of the Titanic and the moon landing in this series.
I think they now sell a puzzle made of the front page of the Times for any date you choose, though it is a bit pricey. One advance in puzzles over the past few years are customized ones. You can buy a puzzle centered around any address you wish. I got one for where I grew up, and for a housewarming present we gave someone a puzzle centered around their newly repaired house. They’ve had make a small puzzle out of a picture for a long time, these are real puzzles, of 500 pieces or so.
