I felt a little flagrant posting my puzzle pictures in the games you played today thread, so I thought why not make a thread specifically for puzzles, their troublin, and the trouble they cause.
I had to spend the night waiting in the ER with some folks, and we pulled out a little mini puzzle I was saving for a camping trip and we did it all in 20 minutes there on the tray that nurses and doctors keep the scapels. it was a good distraction and activity that brought a bit of much needed stillness.
with this one, it flipped my most common strategy on its head: start the frame and move inward from there. This one required us to begin at the top and bottom and move along the center then outward. And on the individual level of the piece, because so many of these colors were similar and flatly rendered, we had to rely on our ability to apprehend the weird shape of the pieces.
so for me puzzling strategy goes like this when I’m searching for a piece:
color > pattern (image details) > edge and shape characteristics. and you can rely on the pattern strategy for a long time because the colors are usually fairly easy to organize into broad groups while shape recognition is too specific to be a swift moving strategy so it’s used mostly just for obsessing up close.
but with this puzzle the pattern strategy runs out of use very quickly and you have to live in the realm of color and shape for like ever. it was brutal!!! when we got to the black border and slightly greyer inner black color pieces, we were sorting things by how many arms or heads they had, while keeping a pile of pieces for the many odd, curved or jagged shapes that were unique to this puzzle.
the trouble this puzzle caused us… almost too much.
these two puzzles are images relating to quilting that I got my partner because she is but into those sorts of crafts. These were cool products because they also contained some background context and history about the image and the artwork depicted. The Gee’s Bend puzzle was also clear about the approval the company sought from the community, and each individual quilt was credited with people’s names and the year they were completed. but yeah. there are some really cool puzzles around these days. and just observing, piece by piece, the weird kitch of old puzzles really does have its charming qualities too. this appropriative new age puzzle I think once glowed in the dark, but my gf had it for so long and built it so many times the glow shed off it probably in some like fashion to the way people once thought these kinds of images felt reverent and mystic. also the center piece was missing, hilariously enough.
Puzzles have been good to have around on a tabletops for the family to pick at, but free tabletops are rare! We bought some holographic grogu one at the thrift store my kids to enjoy and it was so shiny it made us sick to look at it too closely and too long
there are some interesting puzzle gimmicks that, tbh, seem a bit over the top. glow in the dark is a classic and pretty benign. but then there’s like 3D puzzles, and maybe your holographic puzzle lol. There’s one we have that is a puzzle in the shape of a leaping cat, comprised of pieces shaped like cats, covered by images of cats in baskets and out in the garden. It’s ridiculous haha
and that is such an apt description of the color, thank you!
I have that colourful wild owl puzzle but haven’t tried it out yet. I like puzzles but don’t have enough open space in my apartment to truly enjoy them without some sort of mat. Maybe it’s because I am bad at them but I find any puzzle more than 500 pieces to be a bit much. This specific Simpsons puzzle in particular took me forever around the holidays of 2021.
I only started doing puzzles earlier this year and have mostly done 1,000 piece ones. But the one 500 piece puzzle I’ve done was plenty challenging while remaining super fun! 1,000 can be too much. But I wonder if 500 can be too much too. I think it must just depend on the picture and that Simpsons one looks crazy hard.
I don’t expect the owl one should be too hard… but I’ve never been right in my predictions about this sort of thing. If you get around to doing it Iammadmak you should post about it in here! It would be interesting to see if we have similar experiences with it
I will definitely post about it. I have to get through some Gunpla kits to open up some space but I will get there eventually. I find it to be relaxing trying to solve a puzzle at my own place. When I did the simpsons puzzle, I would put on commentary tracks on the criterion channel on movies I had already seen and do my work.
compared to a lot of other puzzles I’ve done, this one was really nice to do — lots of different shapes and textures everywhere, virtually no dead space, and all the mushrooms on it are numbered for convenience
niiiiice!!! i used to be suspicious about these kinds of collage puzzles but after having done a couple of them now I think they are some of the most fun to do. it’s like a puzzle comprised of mini-puzzles, which everyone at the table (or even people just passing by) can find one to focus on. Sometimes it only takes a few minutes to complete one of these mini puzzles, and pretty quickly you are starting to notice how much of the puzzle is getting formed, which feels pretty exhilarating!o Plus, just as you said, there is usually a fun mixture of shape and texture which is fun but also help piece things together.
i ended up doing a third puzzle that was kind of like this since my last post (it was a really weird week).
i love that. i once went to a college party that was very much like one of those you see in a movie and i felt so awkward. but one of the host had a brilliant idea and took an ugly abstract picture they got at like a value village out of its frame and set it on a table around shitty paints and brushes for people to just gather around and paint. it was like such a lovely activity to get absorbed in for socially anxious me. this puzzle idea would work exactly the same i bet!!
I was once gifted a custom print-on-demand type puzzle of my husband and I at the beach holding our toddler nephew. Unfortunately it was mostly blue sky over the pacific, no clouds, so it accidentally ended up being a hell puzzle with a picture of me standing in the corner. The person who gave it to us genuinely didn’t think about how the composition of the image would affect the experience of solving it, haha, and was surprised when we started griping about it!
I’m a fan of Yuu Asaka’s packing puzzles, particularly the jigsaw themed ones, like Jigsaw Puzzle 19, which appears to be all corners and is made of blank acrylic.
But I’ve always kind of wondered if these types of puzzles are actually good gifts for jigsaw people. They’re more in the category of brain teasers. They definitely have a guess-and-match process like a jigsaw puzzle, but they’re probably more maddening than relaxing, and I get the vibe that a big part of jigsawing is relaxation.
For example, I think all of his jigsaw puzzles have multiple red herrings–pieces that fit two or three other pieces but won’t work in the solution for the overall puzzle. The jigsaw puzzles don’t really have a “trick” to them (though his other packing puzzles often do)–more just a “joke” that you figure out right away and have to work around. But the feeling is definitely less like steady progress and more like a Zelda puzzle that clicks into place at a certain point.
I guess the last puzzle we did was Chris Ware’s big thing back in 2021. I liked unfolding the narrative as we put it together and there are fun pieces like this lil spaghett’
I’ve always kind of wanted to check out a depression era jigsaw puzzle.
Apprently the vogue then was to have clearly unique pieces in fun shapes. Mostly they were just whacky blobs, but sometimes they were shaped like objects or complex spirals.
You can actually see Kane’s wife in Citizen Kane assembling a Depression era puzzle when their marriage is falling apart.
Apparently, during the Depression, so many people were out of work that hand cut puzzles became a craze, and there was basically a jigsaw indie boom.
there were some really good puzzles like that that i enjoyed from the early 90s too. called like silhouette? ill just find the karen puzzles video that made me remember them
i liked them cuz they’re easy
so it was neat to see someone taking a break from a 9000 piece astrology puzzle to build them because thats also exactly what i used them for as a kid. to take a break from the gimmicky 2 color 1000 piece puzzle someone got me because i liked puzzles, I DIDNT REALLY LIKE THEM THAT MUCH TBH
