Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t, in fact, hate jigsaw puzzles. I don’t have much time to assemble them, nor are there many clear areas in my home to assemble them on (most clear spaces are promptly filled by book stacks or children’s art projects & toys) but there is great enjoyment to be found in the systematic series of tiny successes, first assembling the border and then finding the interior, moving glacially at first and then steadily more quickly as the amount of available pieces dwindle…
That’s normal jigsaw puzzles, though. Then there are the ones designed to make you swear the things off forever.
First on display, the most obvious type… the monochrome. There are a few varieties, from the all-black to the all-silver, and all of them have the same principle: without the visual cues of the image it’s purely shape connection. One example:
Of course, part of the joy of a jigsaw is watching the picture come together. Monochromes leach that joy from the experience.
Then there’s the other obvious type: the BIG jigsaw puzzle. How big, you might ask? Well, for a little over $425, how about a 40,320 piece puzzle? I hope you just adore Disney. And that you have a spare room in which to assemble it.
After that we move on to puzzles a bit more devious. For example, the Schmuzzle Puzzles. They’re easy by comparison; they have only 168 pieces! That’s smaller than many kids’ puzzles.
Did I mention that they have no borders and that all of the pieces have the same shape? They’re the reverse of the monochromes; here, shape means nothing, the images are everything. And the images are things like piles of gold coins or stacks of pencils.
Lastly, we have the self-proclaimed World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle. These have 539 pieces… but, like the Schmuzzles above, the images are very repetitive. Unlike the Schmuzzles, the pieces are each shaped uniquely.
And the same picture is printed on both sides of the square puzzle… with one side 90 degrees off.
If you’ve ever completed any ONE of these, you’ve got far more patience than I do.
Question of the night: What type of puzzles do you enjoy?
