2025-09-20 part 1

Why part 1? Because I was a bit too excited about puzzling this weekend and did two speed challenges in the same day! During all of the past week I was watching the World Jigsaw Puzzle Competition live on YouTube and I’ve learned about so many new terms, techniques, and types of puzzles I want to try. I’ll have a full blog post on what I learned during the WJPC, but for now let’s look at my first speed challenge of the weekend.

I was a bit worried about this one when I saw the box, but I handled it quite well and was able to finish below the 90 minute mark. I started by putting togther the individual cats, but most of them have roughly the same colours and it was difficult to sort them out. The pop-art style cat in the lower-right, along with the ceramic cats right next to it were easy first targets, including the macrame basket at the top and the two fringed cloths on the right. The border was quite tricky for this one since it’s all brown and there are very few distinguishing features. Eventually I started giving the cats different names, like “alien cat” or “royal cat” to try and tell them apart, but even then I had quite a few “judgmental cat”s or “creepy cat”s and I’m not sure it really helped.

As soon as I had finished the puzzle, I wanted to try it again with a different strategy. I’ll wait a few days before the rematch, but I want to see what happens if I start by building the frame. The lighter wood that separates the rows and columns cuts through the middle of puzzle pieces, so it would be relatively easy to isolate them. My thought is that by building the frame first, I would have 20 or 30% of the puzzle complete and I could isolate a specific square or cat to fill out. I’m confident I can shave a good 10 minutes off my completion time, but I’ll have to actually test it out to be sure. I really enjoy this type of puzzle that can be approached in a bunch of different ways. I kept thinking about it throughout the day and I suspect my rematch will happen before long.

Puzzle Stats

Brand: Ravensburger

Name: Cubby Cats and Succulents

Artist: Brigid Ashwood

Time to completion: 84 minutes and 24 seconds