Give Up: Nirvana Nevermind

For the first time, we’re declaring defeat.  We’re not going to finish “Nirvana Nevermind” by Zee Productions.

As I said when I wrote the Next Up post for this one, “I get the feeling that this will drive us nuts.”  And it was so much worse than I expected.

I’ve mentioned before that I really don’t like large fields of the same color, where there’s nothing to do but resort to brute force.  I get that some people are down for that particular challenge but it’s not what interests me about puzzles.  There was going to be no avoiding it here, though, so after I put together the dollar bill and a bunch of the baby while Jenny was working on the border and the title, we switched: She finished the baby while I worked on plugging away at the water.

Predictably, progress was slow, and I hit a point that just made no sense to me.  In one spot, it seemed like there was only one possible piece that fit.  But then, after trying every possible combination, nothing fit into that piece.  We thought, this can’t be right, so we stalled out.

And then we took the puzzle down, to make room at our table for a game night, which we’d never had to do before.  And we slowly put it back and got at it again, then took it down again for another game night.  Around the time we got the puzzle back up a second time, we got a message via our Instagram account from someone who said they’d gotten this puzzle and were missing many pieces and that Zee Productions had gone out of business so there was no one who could help with the issue.

We stubbornly held out for a little bit longer, then finally admitted that neither of us wanted to put that much effort into a puzzle that, seemingly, doesn’t even have all of the pieces.

It’s too bad, because the feel of the pieces and the quality of the print is really quite nice.  I’m sure this would have looked great completed.  I do think it’s telling, though, that there are lots of photos of completed puzzles from the Rock Saws line and none of them are the 1000-piece variants.  I can only speculate, but it seems like Zee Productions was doing fine with 500-piece puzzles but branched out into 1000-piece versions and perhaps had some quality control issues.  They’re gone now, though, so it doesn’t really matter what we think of their product.

We can say we’re both excited to work on something else.  This one has been on our table (mostly) for over a year now.  It’s time to clear the space and move on.  We might send this on to a friend who has a history with puzzles that have missing pieces and see what she can do with it.