We started “All-Star Premiere” by White Mountain Puzzles last night and cranked through the whole thing in less than a day. It’s the first time we’ve done that on a 1000-piece puzzle in quite some time and it felt really good to do so.
We worked for about three hours last night, including the unboxing, and made a ton of progress, after which Jenny noted that, as much as we sometimes gripe about White Mountain Puzzles’ quality, we do have a lot of fun with them. I noted the waxy texture of the White Mountain pieces in the Next Up post for this one, and while that’s true, it implies that the texture takes away from the enjoyment, which it doesn’t. We fawn over a couple other manufacturers because the texture of their pieces is an added benefit, not because the lack of it is a problem.
As far as White Mountain manufacturing goes, they do have a really nice backing on their puzzles, the fit of the pieces is great, and we got some interesting shapes this time around.
We were able to break this down into a couple chunks that made things come together really quickly. Jenny got the border together and moved on to the sky while I did the marquee. Combined, that got us about half of the puzzle. Then we came back to it for a couple more hours, with Jenny finishing the sky and me taking on the cars. From there, it was a matter of matching up faces and filling in any remaining gaps.
One gripe we did have was that there were several sets of pieces that were already stuck together coming out of the box, which I’m sure some people would consider a bonus. The other was that there was a lot of dust on these pieces. It got kind of messy.
But those are really small issues. This was great overall.
Our soundtrack for this one was all over the place. On the first night, we started with an audiobook Jenny had been listening too, then let Google build a playlist based on “Here & Now” by Letters to Cleo. When we came back this morning, we started with “Social” by Squirtgun and let it go from there.