I purchased the Ravensburger North American Skyline puzzle to put together, with my husband, over the Fourth of July weekend. I selected the puzzle because the picture was beautiful and it had 3000 pieces. Most of the puzzles I could purchase locally only went up to 1000 pieces and those would have been done in a few hours. I was looking forward to this puzzle adventure, because we hadn’t put a puzzle together in at least a decade.
My husband gave up on the puzzle before the border was mostly completed stating that he was having trouble telling a difference between the colors on the pieces. Yes, I was having a little trouble too, but I pressed on. The border wasn’t completed until most of the puzzle was done, because those last few border pieces liked hiding.
The next challenge I experienced was telling the top part of the puzzle from the bottom part of the puzzle. They both looked a lot like, almost identical. The only difference was the bottom pieces usually had lines on them to indicate water. I ended up separating the top pieces from the bottom pieces. And, yes those few border pieces were still hiding.
What was suppose to be a three day adventure ended up being a three months adventure. Ok, I travel some, about 3 weeks, during those three months and some days I only worked on it a few minutes and other days I didn’t work on it at all.
This puzzle ended up being extremely challenging. If you moved a puzzle piece two inches away, it usually changed colors. A lot of pieces were different shades of blue, but it didn’t matter. Even the light blues appeared dark blue during the process. The pieces fit together very well. Still I think I will avoid Ravensburger puzzles in the future.
My father is a puzzler and also enjoys the Ravensburgers, I’ll have to show him your article. 🙂
Ravensburgers are a very high quality puzzle but you just happened to choose an incredibly challenging one. There is usually much better color distinction with pieces. i can usually finish a 1,000 pc Ravensburger in about 6-7 hours.