Well, this is one for the books! A lenticular cut 300 puzzle by Galison that picked up on Marketplace.
Lenticular cut puzzles have a textured bit of plastic on the surface, so that when you change your perspective to an image it might look 3D or like the characters on the puzzle are moving slightly.
I knew I wasn’t going to like this, I had a suspicion that with the plastic texture, I’d get a bit ill staring at the pieces and I wasn’t convinced that the pieces would be cut uniquely enough to give you confidence while puzzling. I was 100% correct!
Every piece fit almost everywhere, I guess because that plastic is tough to cut, the pieces are cut pretty uniformly. This is bad because you’ve got an extra challenge of graphics changing colour and moving around on you depending on your point of view and you don’t have the certainty of knowing that a piece fits there because the cut can’t help you out.
The border was pretty painless as was the outline of the flowers. That I could be sure of. Getting through the greenery around the flowers went up a notch but again, it was doable!
When I was down to solid colour flower petal pieces, that’s when I was really losing it. From the angle I was looking at the puzzle, there was very little difference between the shades of pink and again each piece fit basically everywhere, I went with what I thought looked best but couldn’t place my last four pieces. They fit just awkwardly enough but I knew they weren’t right!
The photos are actually picking up the difference in shade a lot better than in person! I finally decided I’d had enough, I spent way too much time with this for 300 pieces. But I did confirm my suspicions, that I would not enjoy a lenticular cut puzzle.
The photo above shows just how awful that piece cut was, you could literally pull the puzzle apart so easily. That didn’t take any force at all.
Galison makes some pretty great puzzles, I do really enjoy them, but this one was not fun at all.
What would have made it better? Honestly… maybe a random piece cut? Or an image that does not have any solid colour parts whatsoever. Again, the greenery and the outline of the flowers were doable, because I had clues to work with. Even though the pieces weren’t the best fit, I knew I had the right ones. I’m not invested enough to make lenticular puzzles better though, so probably not the right person to ask!
The best part of putting this thing together was when Alomar climbed onto my lap and demanded some snuggles. 🙂
thepuzzlesivedone 