Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Waddingtons, 1979

4000 pieces

38" x 57"

purchased sealed from eBay ($19.32)

Difficulty level: Very, very tough

My first 4000-piece puzzle! I don't usually go for these pastoral scenes, but I'd heard good things about Waddingtons' quality and was looking for a 4000 to try, and this was sealed and cheap.

The pieces don't always align horizontally, as an added challenge:

Water wasn't too bad--since the pieces all had horizontal lines on them, it was easy to tell which were oriented vertically and which horizontally. Then the colors were fairly easy to tell apart.

Time to start the sky . . .

All the blues laid out.

Luckily the puzzle has a repeating cut--both halves are the same cut, flipped 180 degrees, so by dividing it in half, I could use the pattern of cut in the water to match the pattern of the sky. A very slow process, since you can only really tell very dark or very light pieces apart, and there are only a few discernible hints of cloud.

Final push.

Golden Masterpiece Series: Frans Hals

Frans Hals, Portrait of an Officer

Golden, 1970s(?), Masterpiece Series

1505 pieces

27"x33"

purchased sealed (complete) from ebay ($15.75)

Difficulty level: Not nearly as hard as the last Masterpiece Series I built, since now I knew about the pattern and how the specific pieces fit together.

Right around here I was facing several hundred pieces of varying shades of brown, and decided to save myself some sanity and sorted all the remaining pieces by shape. Once that was done, completing the rest was pretty simple, since for the most part each row across is made up of two types of pieces.

Once all the non-standard pieces were in place, it was fairly easy to slot the final pile of standard peg-hole-peg-hole pieces.

A spectacular puzzle. The fit is incredible, the image is wonderful, and quality is top-notch. There are eleven in this series that I know of, but I hadn't seen this one until this copy popped up on ebay. I would love to get all the rest, if I can find them sealed.

Bombardment of Algiers

The Bombardment of Algiers

Ravensburger

3168 pieces

32" x 48"

purchased used from Amazon ($32), assured complete but of course it was missing two pieces

Difficulty level: way harder than I thought. The 9000-piece version must be a beast.

After opening the box, the thing that struck me is that there were very few pieces that were clearly definable as belonging in a specific section--outside of the broad expanses of yellow, blue, and purple/pink, all the ship/water pieces were pretty blobby and I knew it was going to be a tough build.

I figured I would just do the sky first and get it out of the way.

The final push . . .

MB Super Challenge Series, Carmel, CA

Carmel, CA

Milton Bradley, Super Challenge (1978) Series #7

1540 pieces

31" x 23 1/2"

purchased sealed (complete) from Amazon ($18)

Difficulty level: super challenging

Another enjoyable Super Challenge puzzle from Milton Bradley.

First I did the water:

Then the tree with the sun behind it, because the black & white pieces were easy to spot . . .

. . . and worked my way out from there, the sky getting gradually darker.

Until almost nothing was left but pieces that were entirely black or some shade of black.