Map of the Sky

Map of the Sky

Eurographics

1000 pieces

27" x 20"

purchased new ($16) from Amazon

Difficulty level: moderate

I really want these 3000 and 6000 piece versions of the sky map, but they're out of print and really expensive and hard to find, so I settled for this 1000-piece one from Eurographics. I really like the cut of this one; like the Dalek puzzle this is more of a Springbok cut and has very few similar pieces, and hardly any of the standard "peg hole peg hole" shape that compose 90% of most puzzles.

Outline:

Filled in all the lettering and black sky:

Assembled the two circles:

Filled in the plain dark blue:

Did the lighter blue constellation pieces:

Then the rest:

Dalek Blueprints

Dalek Blueprints

Culturenik

1000 pieces

27" x 20"

purchased new ($17) from ebay

Difficulty level: First 800 pieces were easy; last 200 were moderately difficult.

I'm a big Doctor Who fan, and this puzzle looked tough (it reminds me of a 6x smaller and 100x easier version of this puzzle, which is tough to find and expensive when you do). The cut is really nice--it's more of a Springbok cut with its huge variety of pieces, rather than the standard "two holes, two pegs" that make up most puzzles.

The first thing I did was to separate the pieces into four categories: edges, lettering/numbers, pieces that are solid blue, and everything else. The border and lettering were first, naturally:

Next I focused on getting the two Daleks together:

The I filled out all the pieces that had any sort of line or marking on them . . .

. . . leaving just the solid blue to go.

And then it's done. Fun, quick, moderately challenging puzzle.