At a week and a half from start to finish, “Superior Iron Man” from Buffalo Games & Puzzles was the most difficult puzzle we’ve done in the last couple months.
As I said in the next up post for this one, “a lot of shiny red and gold, so it might take a little bit to sort out.” That proved to be true, with a lot of that “gold” actually being shades of green and a lot of that “red” being pink and orange. The illustration style reminded me a lot of the NYPC Harry Potter puzzles we did a couple years ago, and I noticed that it impacted how we put the puzzle together.
With the puzzles that have cleaner lines – whether because they’re based on photos or just because that’s the chosen art style – it’s easier to work with big blocks of color. To say “I’m going to work on this section that is made up of these colors” and find the pieces of those colors and put them together. With this art style, having more gradients and softer edges, we found ourselves picking up a piece, then looking at the poster to see where that piece belonged, then placing it in the proper spot in the puzzle whether we had anything to connect it to or not.
The exception on this one was the “Superior Iron Man” label, as it was pretty easy to find the pieces that had text on them, and the section of the puzzle with all of the heroes around the table.
While the going was slightly slower on this one (Oh no, not ten whole days!) it was still a lot of fun, as we’d expect from this company.
I mentioned in the next up that our soundtrack would start with “Driving With the Top Down.” From there it kind of devolved into a “movie score” playlist. At one point, this awesome remix of the Mortal Kombat theme that Google couldn’t even identify popped up. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was in there. It was definitely unique.