Tag: Buffalo Games

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Frederick the Literate (Repeat)

The current puzzle challenge on the Casual Puzzlers Facebook group involves a weekly clue/puzzle theme, and the second one was Books. For that theme, I chose to redo a puzzle that I originally did back in 2021 – Frederick the Literate from Buffalo Games. This is a Charles Wysocki puzzle, and it is 750 pieces.

This was a lot of fun. I really enjoy putting together words in puzzles, and this one had a lot of those. All of the book titles are made up and cat-related – very cute! Of course, I found the cat fur to be the hardest part.

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Sewing Circle and Confection Street

The day after my friend visited, I did two puzzles from the puzzle box.

The first one was Sewing Circle from E&L Corporation, which was a 500-piece puzzle. It appeared to be an older puzzle from the way the box looked. It was of average difficulty, but not too bad. There were definitely some false fits, and at the end of the puzzle, I had a piece that would not fit in the open spot, so I had to closely examine the puzzle to find the piece that was in the wrong place!

The other puzzle I did that day was a Charles Wysocki called Confection Street. It was a 300-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games. I really liked the image with the colorful houses and other interesting elements. It was quite easy to put together.

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Cat Balloon Race

Cat Balloon Race is a 750-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Jeff Haynie. I am participating in a Spring Hopscotch challenge in the Casual Puzzler’s Facebook group and needed a puzzle for the Air Travel space. As I was scrolling Amazon under that topic, this one really caught my eye.

This was a very enjoyable puzzling experience. The image was too busy to easily sort pieces, so I just pulled out the edges and flipped the rest of the pieces over and put them in sorting trays. I missed a few pieces on the initial edge sort, but they turned up eventually and didn’t cause any problems.

Towards the end I did do a bit more sorting as there were a number of pastel pieces which were a bit harder to place. Overall, this puzzle provided a nice level of difficulty. The only real drawback was a ton of puzzle dust – more than I think I have seen before!

So many fun details in this puzzle! And I loved the image even though I would never go up in a hot air balloon myself. I’m too afraid of heights!

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Pete’s Gambling Hall

Pete’s Gambling Hall is a 1000-piece Buffalo Games puzzle featuring the artist Charles Wysocki. His images are plentiful in the puzzling world, but this is only the second puzzle of his that I have done.

I got this second-hand and was pleasantly surprised to find that all the pieces were there. It’s always a gamble (pun intended!) when you get a puzzle that has already been done before.

There were a number of false fits, and I had to move pieces around several times. Other than that, the quality was good. I appreciated that there wasn’t too much of the sky and mountains because those were the hardest parts to solve.

All in all, a very fun puzzle! I enjoy putting together buildings, so this had a nice variety for me.

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Hawaiian Food Truck Festival

Such a fun puzzle! I got this one from my son for my birthday in 2022 and just got around to it last week. It’s called Hawaiian Food Truck Festival, and it’s a 1000-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games.

I enjoyed all of the fun details in this one. The border came together pretty easily, but then when I was working on the sky, I realized there were several sections in the wrong place. It took quite a while to get it straightened out.

Towards the end, I had to start relying heavily on the poster to figure out where individual pieces went. At the very end, even that wasn’t working, and I had to sort by shape to place the last few pieces.



Even though it’s a very busy puzzle, I still really enjoyed it.

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Cinque Terre

Cinque Terre is a part of the Vivid Collection from Buffalo Games. It’s a 300-piece puzzle that I got from a puzzle box in my area. Even though it has a lot of detail and areas of sky and water, it was pretty easy to put together due to the low piece count.

I loved how rich the colors were, and I enjoyed the detailed buildings all crammed together on the cliffside. I didn’t realize when I was doing it that it is an actual place in northwest Italy.

This is another one I might hold onto for a while so I can do it again. Eventually I will probably return it to the puzzle box.

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Frederick the Literate

So I did buy a 1,000 piece puzzle called Fantastic Fashionista from Ravensburger Puzzles and even finished about half of it, but I never completed it. I had finished all of the colored parts and was left with the white walls and floor to do, so it was definitely getting pretty tricky. Then we went out one day and left Baxter in the kitchen/dining room, and he pulled the puzzle down off the dining room table and completely dismantled it!

I had no way of knowing how many pieces were ruined or missing after that, so I decided to just trash the puzzle. At least I got to do the fun parts of the puzzle before it was wrecked! Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of my progress, but here’s a picture of the front of the box.

Before starting my next puzzle, I went to Michael’s and bought some foam board to put the puzzle on. That way I could move it to the sunroom if I needed to leave Baxter alone in the house (since we close that door when we leave him alone).

The puzzle I just did was Frederick the Literate by Buffalo Games. It’s part of the Cats of Charles Wysocki line. It was super cute. If you look at the picture closely, you can see that the book titles are all fun, made-up titles related to cats. The cat fur was definitely the hardest part, but because the puzzle was only 750 pieces, even that wasn’t too bad.

I am still really enjoying spending time doing puzzles, although I don’t think I have the patience for large difficult sections, such as single color areas. I want to be making progress all the time, even if it’s a bit slower some of the time.

My next puzzle is Sandra Boynton’s Puzzle Complaints. It’s 500 pieces and just looks like a lot of fun.