24. Puzzle Lab retro reviews

Reviews of four puzzles made by Puzzle Lab that I assembled before I launched this newsletter/blog, (about 3000 words; 9 photos)

I began Bill’s Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles (this newsletter/blog) on May 19, 2022, four months after I had first begun assembling wooden puzzles, and two months after I had joined a private discussion group on Facebook called Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club where I began posting reviews and walkthroughs of my puzzles. During those pre-newsletter times I assembled 22 wood puzzles: I have only photos, memories and a log entry for eight of them, and I posted reviews with pictures in the Facebook group for the other fourteen.

Today I am beginning a series of “retro-reviews” to record those early puzzles and my reactions to them here. I appreciate that as I continue to post newsletters it will be increasingly difficult to find my commentaries about particular puzzle-makers when someone wants to learn about them. (A limitation of Substack is that entries only appear chronologically in the blog and cannot be sorted using key words.) Therefore, this one also serves as an updatable central list of all of the Puzzle Lab puzzles that I assemble, with links to the detailed reviews.

In general, “retro review” postings will includes re-post updated versions of reviews I previously posted in the Facebook group as well as brief newly-written commentaries about the earliest eight puzzles for which I only have a photo and memories. In this case I have two of each kind for Puzzle Lab puzzles.

I have been intending to re-post my reviews from the Facebook group for some time now. I am beginning with Puzzle Lab mainly because I currently am preparing a review about one of their new puzzles (songbirds) that will compare it to one of theirs I did last year (lovebirds) and revisiting my past review of that one turned into an interesting stroll down memory lane. That motivated me to start acting on my good intentions. It also inspired me to write brief reviews for the eight puzzles that pre-dated my postings in the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club. Other retro-reviews of my early wood puzzles will continue over the next while until I have documented all of them here.

In general, reposts of the Facebook group reviews will be pretty much as they were originally posted although I will do some light editing for clarity or to express thoughts things more felicitously then they had originally been said. Also, I will integrate replies I made to comments about the original review into text of these retro reviews. But any significant fresh commentary written for these re-posts will be identified as such, and I will add hyperlinks when that might be convenient for readers. The photos will generally be ones that accompanied the original posting.

The newly written retro-reviews for those first eight puzzles will not have much detail. That is partly because of my memory’s limitations and an absence of in-process photos, but mostly because the puzzle-makers tend to be consistent in their quality of their design and fabrication and I have covered most of the salient facts in a more recent detailed review of another puzzle made by the company.

[Note: Officially, Puzzle Lab is spelled puzzle lab, and the names of their puzzles have been with lower-case letters. That looks good on the boxes but using all lower-case in the context of prose often has potential for confusion. So for clarity, in my writing the puzzle names are italicized (when I remember to do so) and the company’s name is generally capitalized. For more information about Puzzle Lab and its founders see this review.]

The puzzles are in in the order that I assembled them:

Pickle Boat

Assembly completed January 16, 2022

made by Puzzle Lab (Victoria, BC)   designer – Andrew Azzopardi
artist – Diane Adolph (Victoria, BC)
laser-cut  6mm (1/4”)  5 ply birch
approx. 300 pieces   9½” x 13½” (24 x 34 cm)    average 2.7 cm²/pc

This 300 piece version of Pickle Boat (it is also available in a 175 piece size) was the second wooden jigsaw puzzle that I assembled.  Since my first one had been Unidragon’s Serious Panda which was 3mm thick, its 6mm thickness of 5 ply birch seemed incredibly luxurious. The puzzle’s parametric design also creates very attractively-shaped pieces, and the large pickle boat multi-piece whimsy (that overlays the boat in the image) is an interesting puzzle-within-a-puzzle with its own distinctive cutting.

As with Serious Panda, my approach to assembly of this puzzle involved extensive referencing of the picture on the box cover and I assembled it edge-pieces first. That was a legacy from my cardboard puzzle days from long ago.  Even so, I found it to be quite challenging (but now can see that the image has many clues that I had not recognized as such at the time.)

This is a scene of a recognizable location in Victoria’s Inner Harbour about one mile from where I live. I enjoyed seeing a familiar location painted so colourfully and with such good humour. The name “pickle boats” was given to a fleet of water taxis like the one you see in this image. That nickname was given to them by Victorians when the service first began in the early 1970s, when they were coloured lime green, and the name has stuck through the years despite their change in livery.

Obviously, due to the fact that I have bought several Puzzle Lab puzzles since then, I quite enjoyed this puzzle. But it did have one major flaw: The image was quite pixilated. This is not readily apparent when just scanning the image of the completed puzzle, but assembly draws attention to fine details and it became quite a distraction while I was doing that. 

Because I was so new to the hobby I didn’t know whether or not this was common, but I contacted the company about it attaching the above close-up photo. I explained that I had enjoyed the puzzle very much except for this issue, and that it is only during assembly that the pixilation was a problem. 

Puzzle Lab’s co-founder Tinka Robev got back to me immediately and was quite apologetic. She confirmed that it does not live up to their company’s standards and offered me either a refund or another puzzle in exchange. She explained that they were a new company that was still using a contracted printing company for their images but were currently in the process of buying a new UV printing machine of their own to enable improved quality control.  They had not known about this problem with the 300 piece size for this puzzle and she immediately removed it from their offerings until they could resolve the problem.

I took this as a sign that Puzzle Lab offers excellent customer service and took her up on the offer of a replacement puzzle.  I went to their workshop and chose . . .

Island of Elements

Assembly completed January 18, 2022

designer – Andrew Azzopardi
artist –  Mike Lathrop  (Victoria, BC)
laser-cut  6mm (1/4”)  5 ply birch
approx. 300 pieces   9½” x 13½” (24 x 34 cm)    average 2.7 cm²/pc

I chose this puzzle because I loved Mike Lathrop’s image, that was originally named “Sunset at Rathtrevor Beach.” I have camped at Rathtrevor Beach Provincial Park, near Parksville here on Vancouver Island, and one of my most memorable camping experiences is having seen a spectacular display of the Northern Lights from this very beach.

I recognized when I chose it that it would be a less challenging puzzle than pickle boat because of the distinctive areas of dark forest, sunset glow, and the receding sizes of the cobbles on the shore.  Even so, it never occurred to me not to assemble the puzzle using references to the image on the box cover.  That made this a fairly easy assembly, only taking about a day, and the fact that I finished it so quickly was a major incentive for me to begin to assemble puzzles no-peek.

moon light / plant sight

Originally written and posted March 13, 2022 in the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles Club

designer – Andrew Azzopardi
artist – Troy Benoit (“Middle of no-where” Nova Scotia)
laser-cut  6mm (1/4”)  5 ply birch
213 pieces   9½” x 14½” (23 x 37 cm)   

Hi! I’m new in this club and I wanted to introduce myself with something special. When I joined about a week ago I was in the middle of a very tough 1000 piece cardboard puzzle (The Sunny City) that required frequent references to the included poster. So I have been lurking here for a week getting the hang of things.

I am Canadian and thought it appropriate that my introduction puzzle should be one from my country. As luck would have it, last Thursday just as I was finishing the cardboard one, I was able was able to pick up this freshly-released pre-ordered puzzle from Puzzle Lab’s workshop (which is about a mile from where I live.  (Note: That was four days before this review was written and posted.)  I learned that I was the first person to get it and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to be first to introduce it to you as my debut posting in this forum.

It is only 213 pieces and although it looked challenging I decided to aim for instant puzzling-cred by being able to say that I had assembled the puzzle without referring to the reference image on the box. I worked on the puzzle quite diligently since then and just finished it this morning.

This isn’t my first wooden puzzle; it’s my sixth And its not my first one without looking at a reference image. That was a 250 piece Wentworth that I did that way last week. 

As you might guess from the picture, moon light / plant sight turned out to be a tough one despite its mere size.  It was a fun challenge but I made it much more challenging than I would have preferred by doing it no-peek.  Throughout assembling it I regretted the promise I had made to myself to do it that way. But you can appreciate that doing it no-peek gave me a great feeling of accomplishment and will encourage me to continue to try to do puzzles that way.

Fortunately, the colour gradient you see in the picture is not due to lighting. The differential comes from yellow and orange mottling. That made it (barely) possible for me to keep my no-peek self-promise.  The yellow-orange colour is actually more vibrant than is shown in this picture, and it is double-printed with viscous ink so there is a 3D effect.  But I suspect that the instant puzzling credibility that I had hoped for may now be overshadowed by an impression that I am a very foolish person.

Despite the pressure that I put on myself I did enjoy assembling this challenging puzzle, but I must admit that I now know that I prefer more picturesque artwork (especially impressionist and post-impressionist paintings) to this type of abstract geometric pattern.

By the way, other than being a customer I have no affiliation with Puzzle Lab or their staff.

chippy

Originally written and posted May 5, 2022 in the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club

photographer – Edith Kangas
made by Puzzle Lab (Victoria, BC)   designer – Andrew Azzopardi
laser-cut  6mm (1/4”)  5 ply birch
approx. 300 pieces   9.5” x 13.5” (23 x 33 cm)    average (2.7 cm²/pc)

Chippy is the fifth Puzzle Lab puzzle I have assembled.  I live in the same city where this small, new (less than 2 years old) puzzle company is located so I should acknowledge that proximity might give me a bit of a hometown bias in their favour, but other than as a customer I have no association with them.  (I might also have a similar bias for StumpCraft even though that other Canadian company is over 1000 kilometres from here. But they are in Texas-like Alberta, which makes them seem even further away from us than Ontario for those of us out here on the Left Coast.)

Puzzle Lab recently opened a store in the touristy part of downtown Victoria, separate from their workshop that is nearby at the edge of the industrial part of town. I got in line to be one of the first 10 customers on their opening day who would get a 40% discount on two puzzles.  I had scouted online to see what I should select if I was one of the lucky ones, but I must admit that this puzzle wasn’t on my shortlist.  The reason?  It is a photograph.

Long ago when I was going to university I shared a house with other students and we always had a cardboard jigsaw puzzle on-the-go for sociable as well as solitary breaks from our studies.  Then we all were very dissatisfied with a cheap, thin, cardboard 1000 piece puzzle with washed-out colours that was made from a photo.  We ended up throwing it out unfinished – an unheard of thing for penny-pinching students to do!

My prejudice against photographic puzzles persisted when I became addicted to wood puzzles in January, but that got overshadowed when I saw this cheerful little fellow on the wall of Puzzle Lab’s new store.  The store is designed to look like an art gallery.  All of their available puzzles are assembled in frames on the wall, with some corners “exploded” to show the cutting style. 

Update: This is how Puzzle Lab displays their wares in the store. image credit

[Digression: The store also has chairs and a table with a few mostly-completed puzzles available for people who are not familiar with wood puzzles to play with. They get to learn what we already know about how the cutting and tactile feel of wood differs from cardboard puzzles, and the satisfaction that comes from putting in those last thick pieces.]

This is image of the completed puzzle is cropped to avoid disclosing the irregular edge.

Chippy jumped off the wall at me (figuratively, not literally.)  I hadn’t paid any attention to this puzzle on the website due to my photo-phobia, and because of that I had not read the description that reveals two attributes of the puzzle which I did not know about before beginning my assembly: It includes four “multi-piece critter-shaped whimsies” and it has “thematic edge cut-outs”.

To maintain the mystery, I am not showing the puzzle edges in my pictures with this puzzle review.  [Update:  I have included my photo of the full completed puzzle at the very end of this posting, after a Spoiler Alert.]  I am also not showing a back-view, but that is for a different reason; it wouldn’t show anything.  Puzzle Lab uses black opaque sealant. 

[Another digression: I asked Tinka Robev, Puzzle Lab’s co-founder, why the backs are black.  She told me that sealant is needed on the front side so that the paper will properly adhere to the plywood, and so both sides need to be sealed to prevent warping. They use black sealant because they consider the scorch marks to be unattractive. She didn’t mention this, but I can think of another reason for a black back:  It is a good way to prevent folks less scrupulous than me from giving spoilers about the puzzle’s cutting design.]

The website quite-correctly describes this puzzle as “challenging” and gives it a 4/5 chilli-pepper difficulty rating. Actually, that part did not come as a surprise to me because I recognized that it had a limited palette of colors and so much darkness. Also, I recognized that Andrew “The Mad Scientist” Azzopardi had designed it with the tricky parametric algorithm that he has developed.  (Nervous System puzzles are designed using a similar algorithmic approach.) 

Andrew explains how parametric design works in his blog.   I cannot understand much of his explanation but I did appreciate seeing how the great 19th century Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi employed the same mathematical principles, but using gravity-driven physical modelling, to design his art nouveau La Sagrada Família Basilica, still under construction in Barcelona.

The upside of parametric design is that Andrew’s algorithm produces attractive and interesting shaped pieces and challenging puzzle cutting. One downside is that any colour-line cuts or other cutting trickery is largely coincidental. Another is that a laser-wielding robot being controlled by a computer algorithm takes wood puzzles one step further removed from the traditional personal craftsmanship required to design and make wood puzzles.

Chippy wasn’t on my want-list when I went to the store opening but a number of other Andrew’s algorithm puzzles were. I knew from his Lovebirds puzzle that Andrew is also very skilled at human cutting-design and I look forward to more of that style being available from Puzzle Lab.  I also hope that those hand-designed puzzles, as well as Puzzle Lab’s further parametric-design ones, use paintings for their artwork. I proved with Chippy that I can do photo-puzzles, but I still prefer to have the aid of brush strokes for puzzle assembly.

Other puzzle lab puzzles that I have reviewed

tiger majesty completed June 10, 2022 detailed review and company history here

songbirds completed February 23, 2023 detailed review here

lovebirds completed February 12, 2022 detailed retro-review of this limited release puzzle puzzle is included with the above-listed review of songbirds

Spoiler alert

Below is a photo that include features in chippy that some people might prefer to discover for themselves.  On the other hand, if your powers of forgetfulness are as good as mine the following content will likely do you no harm. Proceed at your own risk.

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Puzzle Lab’s chippy complete with its irregular edge.

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