Arizona Map

This was a fun one that went pretty quickly. My husband is from Arizona and got a kick out of it too.

Having been puzzling now for10 months, and completing 66 puzzles of various difficulty, I found this puzzle fairly easy, but only for one reason (more on that in a sec). Even so, I do think a new puzzler would find it more challenging. Quality: There were some issues: false fits in the frame, making building it frustrating, and loose piece fit, making moving even small sections annoying. Otherwise, the box is square, large and only fairly sturdy. It contained a sealed bag of pieces, some puzzle dust and no poster. Color match to the full box top pic was fine. The pieces are sturdy, they have some shine. None were together uncut, or actually damaged, however, the remnants of some of the blue backing were still attached to a number of the pieces. No pieces were missing - that would have ruined my ending to this review! Now, for that one reason, starting with the mantra - find the edge pieces and sort by color. Oh my, the edge pieces — so many false fits I thought for sure pieces were missing. It took quite a while to get it together. The sorting was pretty straight forward. I sorted the sky, the Colorado River, the red state outline, the big Arizona, the many, many mainly yellow pieces, all the other multicolor pieces, the smaller text locations, and the bigger text cities and towns. That was the secret to saying this was easy. Construction: I filled in the sky, then pieced and placed (with that aforementioned annoyance) all the locations where they probably belonged in the puzzle. There was now so much color information to piece to. I filled in the big Arizona, some of the Colorado River and parts of the red outline. Then came the rest. Two things - (1) this is a random cut puzzle, even many of the “traditional” shaped pieces can be oddly skewed. So, sorting by shape is definitely more complicated, perhaps even less useful. (2) The huge pile of mostly yellow pieces was intimidating, sub-sorting to what end? To be honest, I did nothing but dump then in the box top and shuffle through them. Many found homes more quickly than anticipated. The somewhat smaller pile of “other” pieces got the same treatment in the box bottom, with the same result. When down to a reasonable amount of pieces, I did arrange them by main color and shape. This was so surprising! This was so much fun! Why? I suppose I bought this puzzle (well, it was #3 in a buy two get one free sale) because I live in Arizona. It is not my favorite style of puzzle. I shy away from “busy”. Imagine if there were no words, just more native animals and plants. Thank goodness Arizona has so many tourist locations!

The variety of places and objects makes this a fun puzzle to do.