Collection of 11 Sure-Lox Puzzles, 7250 pieces total I've been home from my recent road trip for one week now, and I'm getting back into the puzzling swing of things a lot quicker than I had expected to.  Maybe that's because the first two stops I made at local Goodwill Stores turned up a small bonanza of nice puzzles to add to my infamous To-Do stack.  In fact the first two things I spotted were this great collection of eleven puzzles and another of five different puzzles. This Sure-Lox bunch includes two 1000-piece puzzles, three at 750 pieces, and five at 500 pieces, fo ..read more

I have added a formal review of Buffalo puzzles to the "Company Reviews" page and revised (as a result of more exposure to their puzzles) the numeric totals of a couple of others. I have broken point-ties strictly by a gut feel for which for which company's product I would likely reach for first. That said, I do use a point-system to rank the companies, and there is still surprisingly little difference along that 35-point scale in many cases. It seems that most companies are strong in some qualities and just average or even weak in others, so the overall ranking can boil down to only one o ..read more

Focal Point of "Fireside Companions," Buffalo, 1000 pieces, 27 x 20 inches By the time I left for vacation on June 30, I had completed just over 400 pieces of pieces of Buffalo's "Fireside Companions," a 1000-piece puzzle based upon one of my favorite Charles Wysocki images. (I love the way that the painting works books and readers into the setting as a part of everyday life rather than resorting to the same old collages or bookstore or library shelves.) Anyway, I figured that I would quickly finish up the puzzle when I got home...but I quickly learned that my eleven-day layoff had ..read more

I figured that my puzzle solving speed would drop pretty drastically after being away from the hobby for almost two weeks, and I was right. But I was really starting to worry this evening when I struggled more and more to fit pieces into this Charles Wysocki puzzle from Buffalo Puzzles. But just about the time I started to become more and more sure that the puzzle was either missing about 50 pieces or that I had completely lost the skill needed to complete even a 1000-piece puzzle, I picked up the puzzle box for a better look at the cover...and the box made a noise. Turns out that there wer ..read more

"Little Bighorn Battlefield," Impact, 500 pieces, 18 x 24 inches When I left on my summer road trip on June 30, I had high hopes that I would visit at least a dozen thrift shops along the way in search of jigsaw puzzles. Turns out that I stopped by a grand total of three of them, and that I purchased only one puzzle. There was just too much to see and do for me to take the time to search for and drive to very many thrift shops as I made my way from Texas and on to New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, and finally back to Texas. I ended up driving a grand tot ..read more

Road trip!  It's that time of year again, and I can't wait to get started. Every summer possible for almost three decades now I've shifted my car into "wander" and hit the gas. Sometimes I have an ultimate destination in mind, and sometimes I don't. This is going to be one of those "let's see what happens trips." I hope to head out Saturday morning in a general northwest direction, maybe heading toward Monument Valley (around the Arizona/Utah border), then perhaps toward the Wyoming Badlands, and finishing up with a stop at Mt. Rushmore before heading back to Houston. That's somethin ..read more

"Fourth of July," White Mountain, 1000 pieces, 24 x 30 This one from White Mountain took me a day longer than I expected it would, and that's entirely due to the trees that make up almost one-third of the puzzle. I wish I knew why it was, but trees give me more trouble than anything else I've ever encountered in a puzzle. It just seems as if my eyes glaze over when I see all those leaves and partial branches...and fitting pieces becomes near-impossible. And that was exactly what happened again. As you can see from the cover, this is a representation of a Fourth of July celebratio ..read more

"Nice," Hasbro, 300 Easy Grasp pieces, 18 x 24 inches Like so many puzzlers, I often work a "change of pace" puzzle after two or three difficult or large piece-count puzzles. It always seems to give me the jump-start I need to get back to the more difficult puzzles, and "Nice" was no exception. This is a puzzle that I picked up for next to nothing at a local thrift shop, and I failed to notice when I bought it that the puzzle pieces were what Hasbro calls "Easy Grasp" size. That means that I ended up with a relatively large finished puzzle of 18 by 24 inches, all built from only 300 ..read more

I am adding reviews of two puzzle producers today to my ranking list of ten companies previously posted: The Jigsaw Puzzle Factory and Hasbro. I use a point-system to rank the companies, and there is surprisingly little difference in point-totals in many cases. It seems that most companies are strong in some qualities and just average in others, so it's all boils down to one or two category "misses" on the parts of the companies as to where they will rank. Some companies produce too many damaged pieces, some produce poor colors, or too loose a fit, etc., but it seems that they all have at ..read more

"Lancaster County," Milton Bradley, 1000 pieces, 26 x 20 inches The puzzle pickings at my local Goodwill Stores were a little bit below par last week, but I still managed to pick up a half-a-dozen interesting puzzles, including this Amish scene produced by the Milton Bradley people. The puzzle is a little dark, meaning that it will probably drive me nuts when I get to that dirt area in the foreground. I always seem to have a real problem fitting together large sections of dark pieces, something that doesn't seem to be getting much better with experience. "Shoes, Shoes, Shoes ..read more