Elephant Family - Ravensburger 500 pc

 

Brand: Ravensburger

Title:  Elephant Family

Artist: Unknown

Pieces:  500

Size:  19 1/3" x 14 1/4"

Poster:  No

What I liked:  High quality and no missing pieces.  The puzzle has more of a matte finish than the Buffalo Games puzzles I have done recently so there is less glare.  I was also pleased that the box this puzzle came in was considerably smaller than the 300 piece Ravensburger puzzle I did a few weeks ago.  The box is still bigger than the Buffalo Games boxes.  This is probably a good thing, because the only photo of the puzzle is the one on the box.

What I didn't like:  This was difficult for me, I worked on it on and off for almost 2 days.  The main thing I disliked was the photo on the box lid is not larger enough to be very useful.  There are a lot of details that cannot be seen well in the photo, and part of the photo is covered up with a picture of a blue puzzle piece.  The lack of a good reference photo made this more difficult than it needed to be.  Elephants look a lot like dirt as it turns out.  And it took forever to find the pieces with the Marmosets on them.  I encountered a few pieces (two or three) which were not completely cut but they were easy to separate.  I don't think the pieces stayed together quite as well as the Buffalo Games puzzles I have done recently.  Sometimes when I moving a section of pieces some of them would fall off.  I was able to pick up the completed puzzle by the edges.

I was watching a video a few weeks ago of the 2019 World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship and saw that this was the puzzle used for the individual event, so I was interested in trying it out.  The first finisher was Jana Hanzelkova from the Czech Republic, who completed the puzzle in  46 minutes 35 seconds.  I'm pretty sure I took longer than that to put the border together, so I don't think I'll be entering the World Championship any time soon.  I find it amazing how good the competitors are; I think the top 10 finished in less than an hour.