Happy New Year!
We wrapped up “National Parks” by Cavallini & Co. a couple days ago but the end of the year was a bit busy and we’re just getting the chance to write this one up.
We were really impressed by the quality of this puzzle.
I mentioned in the Next Up post that the packaging was really cool but the puzzle itself was also really well-crafted. There was a good weight and feel to the pieces and they fit together really well.
That said, as we did our initial piece sort, we found a lot of instances of two pieces still stuck together.
Hardly a unique problem and not the end of the world. Still, it was very noticeable.
We didn’t really have a personal connection to this puzzle aside from wanting to visit most (if not all) of these places someday. We went to Rocky Mountain National Park a few years ago but otherwise all of our trips to these parks were individually as kids. I think that contributed to me kind of having an empty feeling upon completing the puzzle. There’s no “That was cool” feeling that we sometimes get.
We experimented with this one (again, as I mentioned in the Next Up) and used a puzzle table that I got for Christmas. It worked out really well, though we didn’t use it entirely as intended.
The table has drawers for sorting pieces and we ignored those entirely, continuing to spread the pieces on our dining room table, with the puzzle table on top of that. The puzzle table rotates, which was useful as we each worked from a different side of the table. We could also put the puzzle in one corner of the puzzle table and keep the edges square. There was also a lot less glare from the lights off the puzzle table. We’ll keep using it for now.
We’re not sure whats next yet. We’re expecting the new series (seven new puzzles!) from So Puzzled Puzzle Company any day now and will want to jump on those immediately but maybe there’s time for one more between now and then.