Jigsaw 18, Series 3

As last year, the jigsawing has been poked into life by a Christmas present.

A regular puzzle, 25 tiles wide by 20 tiles high, arranged on a very nearly rectangular grid - part of which is highlighted by a quirk of the lighting in the snap above. With some previous notice having been given at reference 1.

For once, I did not start by doing the border. Rather, I started with the easy-to-find school badges and worked mainly up, eventually completing the upper two thirds of the two foreground figures. At that point I tackled the bottom of the picture, eventually getting down to two holes in the dark blue. After that, the border of the background, then the background itself, already split by some chance finds into a left hand and right hand part. I was helped a little here with a slight colour gradient from left to right.

To do both dark blue and background, I resorted to sorting the relevant tiles by configuration, with the dark blue containing surprisingly few non-standard pieces, standard pieces being the sort with a pair of opposing prongs and a pair of opposing holes - prong, hole, prong, hole.

Configuration apart, I was also surprised at how unhelpful it was to try to match a tile to a slot by shape. While one kept thinking that this was the way forward, it was certainly more interesting, it was usually actually much faster to just bash through the heap, one tile after the other, without trying to be clever about it. Being clever only seemed to work when one was down to perhaps twenty tiles. Then I could quite often - but not always - just pick out the right one.

It is quite easy to make mistakes in the perimeter when there is no interior support, and in the event there were two perimeter errors, which slowed things down slightly. There must be a missing piece! Search the carpet! But, in the event, the amount of unpicking involved was quite modest. Most of the matches were right, it was just a few that were wrong. A few which I imagine, despite the late hour, must be an even few.

Will I get Foppa out this year?

PS: gave the matter of there always being an even number of mistakes some more thought. After which, in the absence of pencil and paper, it was no longer clear what the unit of counting should be, never mind how many of them there were. Clearly a matter which warrants a bit more attention.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/jigsaw-time.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/jigsaw-17-series-3.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/jigsaw-16-series-3.html.

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