The Land of Waldos

I love a fun challenge, so I decided to tackle a Where’s Waldo puzzle of pretty much nothing but Waldos.

And what a challenge it was! It was the cartoon puzzle along that motivated me to finally pull this off the shelf and try out. That’s the best thing about these puzzle along events, they often give me the motivation to tackle a puzzle that I’ve put off for whatever reason.

This puzzle is a vintage 550 piece puzz by the Great American Puzzle Factory, it has the same random piece cut as the Penguins on the Beach puzzle from my childhood puzzling memories, but it was way harder! That’s not say that I didn’t enjoy it, I actually had a lot of fun putting it together, and when I placed that final piece, I was overjoyed!

The progress on this was slow and methodical, I worked mostly off of piece shapes and trying to visualize what the image would be, but it can be tough when you’re looking at a sea of blue legs and red and white striped shirts. There was also the possibility that this copy may not have been complete, so I didn’t dwell too long on one spot.

I think that was the key, if I just kept staring at one spot and puzzling over what could possibly go there, I think this would have taken me weeks. I worked on this over about five days, some shorter puzzle sessions and one very long one at the end, probably about 4 hours straight. At the end, I just saw how close I was getting and I had to see the complete image.

And it was complete!

Now…. Did I find the one Waldo? No.

The puzzler has to find a Waldo missing a shoe, and then locate said shoe. I searched and searched and finally gave up! I was honestly in this for the puzzle but I will check out YouTuber Puzzlephile’s video on this puzzle again. He had featured this puzzle and located the shoe-less Waldo so I’ll have to check it out.

Will I do this puzzle again? Definitely not! Ha ha, once is absolutely enough. I enjoyed this for what it was and I will pass it on to someone who would enjoy the challenge.

This puzzle goes back to 1990, the illustration is by Martin Hanford, and the quality as is always the case with the vintage Great American Puzzle Factory puzzles, was wonderful!

Would I recommend this? Yes, if you like a challenge, if you enjoy a good quality vintage puzzle, if you aren’t overwhelmed by stripes and silly grins, 100%. If not, then you do you and thanks for reading!