Great news – we finished and all the pieces were there! It turns out our worry about the puzzle having been done before was for naught! Christina never did the puzzle before passing it on to us.
We also managed to finish while Christina was streaming today too. We were a little worried about being able to finish while she was streaming because with the standard ribbon cut of the pieces plus the swaths of identical colors (sometimes in multiple places on the map), there were times it was a slog. We also found it difficult to get started, in part because while I have read Lord of the Rings and seen the movies (Clark has not) I am not a super fan, the artwork was daunting.
One thing that was really difficult doing this puzzle was the lack of a high-quality image to look while piecing this together. At different times, we both took photos of the lid so we didn’t have to share the lid anymore either. Even with the photos on our phones, it was still hard to discern landmarks and rivers – especially when the text was tiny. The black border was also just thick enough that it was impossible to start from there. We had to start with the grey carved stone work that was just inside the black border. And, of course, time just generally got away from us with working on So Puzzled Puzzle Company.
The pieces themselves fit in really well when you got a match. That was very helpful in the mountains and grasslands in particular. The density of the blues in the ocean were gorgeous. The ways the mountains and some of the trees were drawn were immensely helpful for telling if the piece was right side up or not.
Overall, I don’t think we’d do this one again, and I can understand why they are no longer being made.
Stay Puzzled – and check out sopuzzled.com to see what else we’ve been cooking up!
xo,
-j
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