A Jigsaw Puzzle that’s entirely Edge Pieces

Today’s video is sponsored by Squarespace thanks Squarespace. Oh my god, it’s true every single piece, all 1 000 pieces are in fact edge pieces. Why do I do this? Hi? Everyone welcome back to Karen puzzles.

So today, I’m taking on these jigsaw puzzles called the edge, which is a jigsaw puzzle with only edge pieces. This is a full-size 1000 piece puzzle and every single piece is an edge piece. I know you might be wondering how that works? So if we look at the back of the box, you can see this um texture in the background which sort of gives you a hint of how the pieces are going to fit together. These were released by a company called tdc games and on the back, you can actually see that they have a patent for this idea.

So of course, because I’m me I had to go online and look up this patent and sure enough. They have a patent for this type of jigsaw puzzle with only edge pieces. You can see they have diagrams and everything and a lot of very technical language, so I’ll link that down in the description. If you want to read the whole thing for yourself, but anyway, I decided to get two of these puzzles. I liked this one because it’s a fairly simple image, and so I thought it would look really nice on camera and you would very easily be able to see the shape of the pieces.

But then I also got this one. This Mona Lisa design, just because with all of these different textures, I just thought it would be fun, so I’m just gonna do both of them, but I’m not mixing them together. So don’t even suggest it. I don’t have time for that right now. I think I would literally go crazy, so on the back, you can see that the level of difficulty is extreme, not even high extreme.

So I’m going to put this to the test. Let’S uh do the sorting and then I’ll check back in with what I think. My strategy is going to be so after finishing the sorting I have to apologize. I lied to you. This puzzle isn’t entirely edge pieces.

I mean sure it’s mostly edge pieces, but we also have four corner pieces: dirty filthy lies. I hope that you can all forgive me one day for how much I have lied to you, but anyway, let me take you through how I sorted all of these pieces. So part of the reason why I chose this image is because it’s relatively simple for a jigsaw puzzle, because you have so many clear definitions between all of the different colors. So obviously I’m going to start with this cupcake in the middle. You can see.

I sorted out the orange at the bottom, the pink frosting and then the green candle and other little bits of the cupcake. Then we’ve got pieces that are entirely yellow pieces that are entirely blue and pieces that are part, blue and part yellow in here we have all of the pieces that are entirely fur and then in here we have pieces that are part fur and part either blue Or yellow – and I should be able to use these to form the outline of the cat to make it a little easier to fill in the piece quality is totally fine, not the thickest pieces, i’ve ever seen, but they don’t feel flimsy. It feels fairly sturdy. You can see that it has a bit of a sheen, but it’s not like totally glossy and i’ll be able to talk more about this as I go, but so far it seems like the piece shapes are unique enough that, even though I’m losing information from one Side of the piece I should be able to use the piece shape to put this together. The only real quality issue that I’ve had so far is that a lot of the pieces were still stuck together when I first dumped them, but it was only just a little bit in the corner where they were still stuck together.

So it was easy for me to just pull all of those apart, so I’m actually feeling really good about this puzzle so far, so, let’s, let’s just start actually putting it together. Oh boy, I think this is what I’m gonna be dealing with a lot in this puzzle. This connects here, but it doesn’t actually connect. So I just have to slot it in right next to that piece and try not to jostle these around too much and let them get separated. I do see that this piece um goes here, but it doesn’t help very much oh, but wait.

I think this one will actually connect them there. We go okay back on track. Oh man, I am loving this so far. I mean to be fair. I’Ve only done the easiest part of the puzzle, but I haven’t had any trouble with it and I think, having all of these straight edges adds an extra unique element without making it frustrating from here. I think I’m gonna start working on all of the fur and the outline of the fur.

I’Ll be honest, I really hate doing photos of animals as puzzles, so many fur pieces like this just kind of grosses me out, but I’m gonna power through for the video for youtube all right, so that took just a little over an hour to do the Entire cat um again, I’m really not having any trouble with this at all. I think this might actually be the bottom edge and that’s where it’s actually going to start getting a little trickier, because now I am working my way out and I’ll have to keep an eye on the picture to know where to stop. Although, actually, no that’s not true, because look at this all of these are edge pieces right in a row, but in the middle you never really have more than like two in a row at once. So I guess it’s not actually that complicated. This is the bottom edge and, as I work my way out – and I start seeing more like longer edges, then I’ll know that I’ve actually reached the edge.

Somebody should count how many times I say edge in this video. I think I’m going to do these pieces next um, not necessarily because it might be the easiest, but because I think it’ll look really cool just to see the outline of all of these checkers. I’m loving this puzzle. I’m a big fan of this gimmick. Oh man, look at how cool that looks and that’s gonna make this big pile of solid colored pieces.

A lot easier to fill in. You can see. I have all of the yellow pieces over here and then all of the blue pieces over here, I’m going to start with yellow because it’s a lot easier to see the different shades in the yellow color. We have a lot of these darker colors, which is this shadow on this side. These pieces that have a little more red in them are up at the top and getting to the edges actually wasn’t quite as difficult as I thought.

You can see that I have all four of them pretty much outlined out by now and there it is the very last edge piece and I have finished the puzzle. I’m not gonna lie that the last little bit of solid colors was pretty brutal. But overall, I really liked that I do have a couple critiques, but I think that I will save them for after I do the second puzzle all right. It is the next morning I’m taking on the Mona Lisa puzzle and I decided to start by just flipping everything over and not doing any sorting just because I thought it would look cool and it does. It might look really intimidating.

But trust me, it’s not gonna be that hard. So this is the full picture that we’re making and now that I have everything laid out. I can really easily just pull out all of the most distinct textures, so this one will definitely be very easy to spot because it is, unlike anything else, on the picture, so I can literally just scan over all these pieces grab that piece that piece and then You know it’s basically, a bunch of little mini puzzles that all connect, so this one is not going to be difficult so well, this video was not quite as dramatic as I was expecting, because these puzzles they just weren’t very hard. You got into harvard law what like it’s hard in total, it took me five hours to do the cat puzzle and then four hours to do the mona lisa puzzle, which is honestly the exact same amount of time that I estimate these would have taken me if They were just normal jigsaw puzzles, but I mean I still enjoyed them and it is nice sometimes to do a puzzle here on this channel. That doesn’t take me 14 hours to finish, but I do have one main critique, so the entire concept behind these puzzles is that you’re not supposed to know which edge pieces are the real edge pieces right?

Well, if you look closely on three of the four sides, the real edge pieces are a lot skinnier than the inside pieces. So you can see in some of the time-lapse photos that I was able to identify the real edge pieces and build those out before filling in the middle, which kind of defeats the purpose of making a puzzle where every single piece could be an edge piece. Also, a few of the edges in the middle of the puzzle are a little curved, so that was another huge clue that they weren’t actual border pieces and, as I mentioned before, on the inside of the puzzle, you never have more than two edges in a row And they’re evenly distributed into a regular pattern. So I almost wish these puzzles just didn’t have real border pieces and this piece cut pattern. It just continued all the way to the edge so that you truly would not know up front which pieces were the real border pieces.

Do you know what I mean also if they did it that way, they wouldn’t have to include real corner pieces, and so again you wouldn’t know which ones are the real corner pieces. So if we go back to the patent, you can actually see that this diagram on page four is the one that they ended up producing. It has the same regular pattern of the straight edges in the middle of the puzzle, but they also included a few other concepts in the patent. There’S one that actually has corner pieces inside the puzzle. This one has these interesting pieces which have straight edges on the top and the bottom, and then this one has an irregular edge, so the straight lines only show up as inside pieces.

So they definitely had a lot of really good ideas and I would have loved to have seen them push this further and try some of those other ideas too. I think this is such a cool gimmick and it was such a fun puzzle, but I feel like they stopped just short of executing it to its full potential, so I do want to call out the two things that made these puzzles very easy. First was having very unique piece shapes. I didn’t have any false fits when a piece fit into place. I could be sure that that’s where it went and I could use the piece shape characteristics as another clue when I was looking for the next piece. So, even though we were missing a fourth of the typical information that we would have from a puzzle piece, the rest of it is so unique that there was still plenty of information there to be able to easily put this together and it really wasn’t any harder Than any regular jigsaw puzzle and then the second reason why these were pretty easy is just that they used really easy images.

There are very distinct colors and textures in all of the images that they chose for this line of puzzles. The ones that are like collages of a lot of different small items would be a little harder, but still definitely doable. These puzzles came out in the early 2000s and I feel like they were released today. It would be like there’s only edge pieces and it’s a solid color and there’s a piece missing and it’s double-sided, but with only the one change from a regular puzzle like just having all of them be edge pieces. It’S fun, it’s worth doing, but it really is not nearly as difficult as they were trying to make it seem, but tdc is still an active company.

They’Re still making puzzles today. So maybe they’ll see this and bring back this series, but with slightly more modern images. Imagine this concept, but with a gradient, obviously, would be super fun or like a pop art pattern, or even just the colorful modern illustrations that a lot of puzzle companies are doing today. I think this concept is strong enough that you can make the images a lot harder, and these puzzles would still be really fun and not frustrating. As far as I can tell, they only released seven of these and the images they chose are so random, like I just want more, but I just want it done slightly better, also um, one more quick thing.

I know you’re all gonna ask, yes, these are the exact same puzzle cut and, yes, you can swap pieces from one puzzle to the other and they fit perfectly. Once again, I made a little bit of artwork. Okay. So all that being said, in my final review, I did enjoy these puzzles and I think that’s the most important part. You know a lot of puzzles these days have some crazy gimmick, but it’s at the expense of the enjoyment of the jigsaw puzzle, and that definitely was not the case here.

So if you want to get them, um they’re not too rare, they show up on ebay really often. I might go ahead and get some of the other ones from this series just for fun. So, okay, now let’s switch gears and hear from today’s sponsor squarespace. So if you’ve been watching my recent videos, you know that I’ve been using squarespace to figure out what I want the karenpuzzles.com website to look like. I have moved on to the about page and this is a little tricky, because I do a lot of different things, so you can see that so far I have just a picture.

Some filler text, this gallery of youtube videos which was so easy to put together. I was also thinking about doing a section with uh previous things that I have done on the internet, because i’ve been on the internet for a really long time, but there’s even more that I want to add. So I love that, if you just click, add a section you get all of these different templates for every different type of section. You know you would need a website, so I love that their website builder is so intuitive and you can just see it right in front of you. You can see your website come to life, so if you want to try it for yourself, head to squarespace.

om for a free trial and when you’re ready to launch your site, go to squarespace.com karen puzzles for 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain, I should Know that by now i’ve said it enough times all right, so I hope you guys enjoyed not seeing me struggle at a puzzle for a change. Let me know in the comments: if you’ve ever done one of these puzzles or if this is the type of puzzle that you might want to try your code word for the comments. If you watched all the way to the end it would be the edge. I keep wanting to do it as like the intro from tron legacy, the edge a puzzling frontier.

I tried to picture clusters of puzzle pieces as they moved into place. What did they look like? Curves were the borders like contours, I kept dreaming of a puzzle. I thought i’d never see and then one day I got in a burn, broom, burr and then daft punk started playing. Okay, I think that’s enough for today’s happy puzzling.

I will see you all in the next one.