Nature’s Bounty Box – Puzzlebug – 500 pieces

You can’t believe it, right? Stacey the puzzle snob did a Puzzlebug puzzle? Yes, I did. I don’t think I’ll be doing one again soon, there are just too many excellent puzzles here at my house to be assembled; but I really liked this image and even though this brand isn’t one I ever buy, not even at the thrift store (usually) there was something about this one. And for only $0.99 cents I just had to give this brand another go because this image spoke to me.

I decided to do this puzzle on a day when I wasn’t feeling well at all. I dumped the pieces out of the box onto a tray and started sorting, but I had to take a break relatively quickly and didn’t go back in the puzzle room for the rest of the day. The next morning when I made my way back to the puzzle board I looked at the VERY thin pieces and to be perfectly honest I almost dumped them in the garbage. They were so thin, I thought to myself “there’s no way these pieces are going to fit together properly, this will be a horrible assembly”. But before I did anything I found two edge pieces that went together to check the fit, and it was much better than I anticipated. As you can see from the picture above, I didn’t toss the pieces in the trash, I continued on with the sorting and assembly.

There hasn’t been a Puzzlebug puzzle on my board in 10 years, I checked. Any fair and impartial blogger should give them another go and see if the quality has improved, right? Well, that’s not why I bought this puzzle, I just really liked the image and for some reason I’m not sure of I bought it. They’re still pretty far down the quality food chain in my opinion, but there are a couple of positives: the image reproduction is very nice, if a little shiny, and the fit is actually quite good – whole sections could be picked up and moved with no problems at all, and they have some amazing, colorful images to choose from. On the negative side; there is no variety in piece shape, every piece is either a long, thin or a short, fat ballerina, the chipboard used is very thin, there were many pieces still attached and with hanging chads, and the puzzle dust wasn’t really dust, it was bigger pieces of paper from the chipboard and there was a lot of it. I don’t normally speak about boxes because I’m not a collector and I don’t care much about them; but their boxes have a flip top, made of very thin cardboard, and if you were someone who keeps puzzles it’s the type of box that makes losing pieces easy.

The assembly was a little disappointing, but still it was fun to watch each box fill up with the chosen food as the assembly went on, and it wasn’t so easy as to be boring. I can see the draw for those people who don’t work as many puzzles as some of us and don’t know all the different brands and qualities available, or for those who don’t have as much to spend on non-essentials like puzzles. Puzzlebug has many images that look extremely entertaining to assemble, and you can’t beat the price of less than $2 brand new in most dollar stores.

There’s no judgement here if you buy this brand, however you puzzle and what puzzles you buy is none of my damn business. I enjoyed this assembly, and if you enjoy working this brand then more power to ya, truly. It’ll probably be a while before I assemble a Puzzlebug again, but I was a little more impressed with this brand than I was the last time. And honestly if I see one of their beautiful images at the thrift store (they really do have some gorgeous, colorful pictures to choose from), I just may buy another one! 😮

In fact…

The fit was so good that I got one of my favorite pictures!

I saw a post on a Facebook puzzle group recently where someone had taken several 350 and 500 piece Puzzlebug puzzles and glued each one to make placemats for the kitchen table. They looked so good, it made me stop and think it just might be a good idea to try. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.