- Simply put, Dad’s Shed is a challenging puzzle to solve.
- Contains lots muted colors and repetitive patterns.
- Recommended for those that love cats and up for a challenge.
Title: Crazy Cats “Vintage” No.6 – Dad’s Shed
Pieces: 1000
Artist: Linda Jane Smith
Size: 27in x 20in or 70cm x 50cm
Company: Ravensburger
Year Printed: 2018
“Mess” is probably the most concise word to sum up this specific puzzle. The title is a mess, the illustration is a mess, and depicts a mess. Overall, it is a mess. Mess in the context of busy, complex, and challenging and not that this is a bad puzzle.
Crazy Cats “Vintage” Number 6, Dad’s Shed is the official title of the puzzle as stated on Ravensburger’s website. The puzzle’s title is long and convoluted. It tries to say too many things, such as the sixth puzzle in the Crazy Cats Vintage series called Dad’s Shed. I feel that Buffalo Games does a better job of naming their series and puzzles. If Ravensburger was to do something similar to Buffalo Games, the collection would be stated separately, but not included in the puzzle’s name. Ravensburger should have just called the puzzle, Dad’s Shed, and indicate separately that is part of the Crazy Cats Vintage collection
Furthermore, the illustration depicts a shed filled with nineteen different cats. Dad may have done a good job of organizing his shed, but the cats have completely messed it up. Finally, the illustration is messy and filled with muted pastel colors and repetitive patterns through out the illustration. For example, the terra cotta pots have distinctive patterns, which is easy to sort. However, there are numerous pots located throughout the shed, making it challenging to determine which part of the puzzle that the terra cotta pots belong to. The majority of the illustration also uses muted pastel color and few bold, bright colors.
Build
The puzzle sorting strategy was focused on the following areas: the border, bright color pieces, and the cats, which is probably less than a third of the puzzle. There were only a handful of bright colorful pieces, such as red, bright/bold blue, and dark green. Majority of the pieces were left in an unsorted piles as most of them looked similar to each other due to the muted pastel color and/or repetitive patterns.
Difficulty
Due to limited sorting and the abundance of repetitive colors and shapes, the puzzle was difficult to solve. In addition to the terra cotta pots, the were lots of repetitive patterns, such as tiny mice, wooden planks, bamboo rods, and ivy. Combined with the muted colors, it was difficult to determine where the pieces fitted. There were lots of misleading clues. It took four puzzlers slightly over six hours and twenty minutes (6:21:24) to solve the puzzle. In comparison, our last 1000 piece puzzle, Disney Carnival, filled with bright colors and distinctive patterns only took two hours and fifty minutes (2:46:17) to solve. Overall, a challenging puzzle to solve due to the “messiness”. Recommended for cat lovers and folks who are up for a challenge.
Lastly, this is our 54th puzzle from the 87 puzzle collection. Leave us a comment, if there are any other Crazy Cats puzzles that you would want us to review.
Looks like a hard puzzle. I like it.