Did I cheat at this 20 piece jigsaw puzzle? (it’s a tricky one)

Did I cheat at this 20 piece jigsaw puzzle? (it's a tricky one)

Did I cheat at this 20 piece jigsaw puzzle?

I have no strategy, i don’t know what I’m doing yeah this is. This is so hard. Why do I sign up for things like this? Oh, this is looking really good. Hi everybody, welcome back to Karen puzzles.

Today I am taking on the pento puzzle, which is a jigsaw puzzle where a lot of the pieces are already stuck together. Sounds easy right, half the work already done for me, not so much. At least I mean I don’t think so. I am looking at this and I literally have no idea how long this is gonna take. I could see it taking 15 minutes.

I could also see it taking three hours. This is another puzzle, brain teaser that was sent to me by puzzle master, and I am now an affiliate with their site. So if you want to, you know, get any of the puzzles from their site, including this one uh. Please use my affiliate link, which is down in the description also i just wanted to. Let you guys know that I have made a big decision.

This has been something that I’ve been thinking about for a really long time, and I thought it was finally time to do it. I have decided to start tweeting again. I was like a big tweeter for a long time and then I just kind of got burnt out on it and I didn’t tweet for, like I don’t know the last three years, but I decided to get a fresh start on my karen puzzles account. So if you want to follow me on twitter, you can do that now so anyway, enough of the intro, let’s just jump right into this puzzle, alright. So before I get started, there is one thing about this puzzle that has not been totally clear to me, and that is whether all of the connectors are exactly the same.

Like can you fit every piece theoretically like into every other piece and on any spot on the edge or are the connectors unique, which then would make it easier? Because you would know you know whether you were right or wrong. Putting a piece in so here is the board that it comes with, and you can see it has all of these puzzle piece connectors all the way around the edge, so i’ll just grab a piece at random and I’m just gonna try it like all the Way down the edge, it seems like it seems to fit anywhere. So I think all of the connectors are exactly the same. Let me just try to fit these different pieces together, yeah, pretty much any way that I try to put any of these pieces together.

Like they all fit together, so they could really be arranged in any way, so that will definitely make it a little more difficult. But i guess that makes sense like it’s not really a jigsaw puzzle, it’s a brain teaser in the shape of a jigsaw puzzle. So if all of the connectors were unique like that would actually be too easy also, i just want to give you a little tip. So when you buy this puzzle like when it comes in the mail, it actually comes assembled with all of the pieces. You know, fitting into place here and when you fit some pieces together, you can kind of tell like where the outlines are between what’s laser cut into the wood and where it’s actually two separate pieces.

So what I had to do was like not look at it. I basically just had to look at the back of it. It comes shrink wrapped, so i just had to cut it open, let the pieces kind of fall out without looking and mix them all up, because if you look at the finished solution when it comes in the mail and you stare at that, like you’ll see what The answer is without getting to solve it yourself, so just a little tip if you do get this so before i start here is just a nice close-up, so you can see exactly what the pieces look like. You can see that it’s basically laser-cut wood and then on the front they have the outlines of the different puzzle pieces kind of outlined into it. Each one of these has five puzzle pieces in different configurations, so the goal is to just get all of them to fit onto this board.

There are 20 pieces in total of five pieces each, which means that it’s basically a hundred piece puzzle, but a little more difficult than your typical 100 piece puzzle. All right. I think I’ve stalled long enough. I think it’s time to tackle this, so I am starting. My time right now, okay, so my first thought is that um, you can kind of use the shape of the pieces to know which ones go along the edge, because, obviously something like that, you know we have no single pieces, so that has to go somewhere in The middle or you know this has to be along the edge, so maybe i will sort my pieces just so.

I can see what I’m working with. So we have two long guys which reminds me of tetris. We have two t-shaped pieces. We have two c-shaped pieces. Oh, my god, half of these are letters. I could literally spell something out. It looks like we have a staircase shaped piece, but I’m not seeing a second one.

Okay, so it looks like we have a fair amount of basically duplicate pieces. So I don’t really know how that’s going to help me. I think I just need to start actually placing pieces on the board and just see what happens all right. So I mean I got a fair amount there. Obviously, there are some spots in here where I just don’t have those pieces left, so I did not get it on the first try.

I guess I just like it. I don’t even know how to make a strategy because number one, once you put the pieces in here, it’s hard to see where the edges of the pieces are. You can kind of see, but it all kind of blends together and then I don’t know it just kind of feels. Like luck, I mean – maybe I have to get to know the pieces a little bit better and sort of know what I’m working with a little bit better, but it seems like there’s so you can just get so close to the end. So many times i just not know if you have it right until you get down to like the last two pieces and i feel like I’m just gonna get it wrong over and over and over again, and i only have 90 minutes left on the memory Card of this camera, so i hope it takes less time than that.

Also, i don’t think i said this in the intro, but this is a level 10 puzzle, so i mean i knew it was gonna be hard going into it, but i just i have no strategy. I don’t know what I’m doing. [ Music ] see. Here’s the problem, I know that I have a piece that is this exact shape, but I literally have no idea where, on the board, it is because it is so hard to see where the edges of the different pieces are. Oh, my god, wait.

Is this cheating? You know what i just realized when i dumped it all out on the back, you can see the wood grain so i’ll at least know the direction. You know that these are gonna. Go eliminates half of the possibilities. Should I mean if I don’t use that I literally think I’m gonna be here for six hours, because I have no other strategy. Should I just use that or is that cheating?

Actually I mean you can see the wood grain on the front of the pieces as well, so I’m gonna say that that is not cheating, because this is the material that they chose to use. So any hint that I can use. You know from their choice of material, I say, is fair game. You know they could have made this out of like um plastic like acrylic, and that would have been. You know you wouldn’t be able to do this with that, because it would be a solid color.

All the way through so if they chose to use wood grain, then I’m gonna use the grain of the wood to solve this puzzle. [, Music, ], okay. So now that eliminates like half of the possibilities, as i said so, maybe now i’ll actually get somewhere. 11 minutes in [, Music, ], okay, so now this might actually be cheating. I don’t know, feel free to leave a comment if you think this is cheating or not.

Basically, when I flipped all of the pieces over the wood had some imperfections in it. So you can see this brown line going through and it basically turns it back into a jigsaw puzzle, because you have a picture. You have elements on the pieces that you would like to match up now. I know that these two pieces have to fit together like this, so maybe i should just do it backwards on the table outside of the frame and then once i have a perfect square, i can just flip it over into the frame. This might be cheating.

I don’t think this is how you’re meant to do it, but when I’m on the clock and when I have a new episode of wandavision that I really want to go watch, maybe I should just take all the help. I can get [ Music ], my gosh, I’m sure I must look crazy, just like hunched over staring at the tiniest little details in the wood grain trying to find anything that lets me know what goes together: [, Music ] all right. I wonder now that we’re like 23 minutes in. I wonder if i can start flipping this over and maybe like matching it to the wood grain, that’s on the edge of the puzzle, because part of the problem that i keep running into is i see like little lines or things and there’s nothing for them to Insert into and because of this piece that they glued to the back of the frame, i don’t know what the back of the the frame looks like, so i might need to try to match up some of this to the edge, but i don’t know what exactly Is going to be on the edge? Oh, my god this is so hard.

Why do I sign up for things like this? Also, theoretically I mean the edge could have been cut from a different piece of wood than the middle. I don’t know if this is all you know of the same piece of wood, so maybe the middle won’t even match up to the wood. I didn’t like looking at that when I got it in the mail, so I don’t know, maybe not that that might have been. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, oh no.

I flipped it over and I forgot where this piece was. Oh no, was it there? Okay, so a lot here I think, it’ll be hard to see on camera. But there’s a lot going on in here where I can see little imperfections in the wood. All matching up this little corner piece has me a little puzzled, but i think all of this is right because it all fits together really nicely and a lot of these, like little subtle lines, are all lining up.

So maybe we have that guy, oh, my god that one fits okay. I admit I am fully cheating. Is it cheating or is it being resourceful? Okay, so I think that yes, oh my god. Oh my god!

This is the correct width of the puzzle, so I think everything down here, I’m pretty sure, is correct. Moving up here, I don’t have any pieces left that could fit into this little section. So I think this one is wrong. Oh, this is looking really good. Wait.

Oh, my god, wait, wait, wait! I’m so close! Wait! Oh there! It is!

Oh wait! Oh my god! I did it now. Let me just flip it over into the actual thing and then I’ll stop the timer, because this whole situation is fully cheating. I know I know I’m aware of that: it’s fine 30 minutes and 41 seconds.

Well, that was fun. I guess I do have some thoughts, though, and I think we can get a good debate going in the comments, because I know that that was not the way that you were supposed to do this puzzle. Okay, I know I know you don’t have to tell me. I already know [ Music ], okay, so here is the finished solution and I might highlight where all of the outlines actually are, because it’s really hard to see when you’re just looking at the puzzle pieces. So I can confirm now that I’m looking more closely at it, that the wood that is on the border and the wood that the pieces are made of are not from the same slab of wood, um yeah, the wood grain doesn’t match up.

Here’S the thing i think this would be so fun to like have out on your desk and when you’re procrastinating from work, when you just need to take a little break to just play with it, and you know randomly put in pieces and just try to find The solution that way so fun right such a fun little desk toy, but when I’m filming a video, i don’t want to be sitting here like all day long, just randomly putting in pieces trying to find the solution and not having any idea. If I’m getting closer to the solution until you know until you’re down to the last piece, that’s why I did cheat by looking at the wood grain. I don’t necessarily think that wood grain was the best choice of material for this puzzle, because if they really want to force you to do it just by the shape of the pieces, then they should have chosen one that is fully solid. All the way across with no hints to like what definitely goes together or doesn’t i mean i don’t know what the intent of the puzzle makers was. Maybe they do want you to use that. I have no idea.

So let me flip it back over and show you now that I’m not under a time limit like show you what little clues. I found that helped me piece it together. So up here, you can see any of these like darker brown lines. That’s definitely an obvious clue that these two pieces go together. There was this kind of gray line going all the way across, and so that helped me get a bunch of these pieces together.

There’s this little darker area, which was over some of the cuts, so that helped me get these three corners together. Here is another brown line, so you can see that obviously those go together also doing it this way without having the outlines of the puzzle pieces on it. I think it’s easier because you can more easily see the different shapes of the pieces without getting distracted by all of these outlines, that kind of muddle, where the separation between the pieces is so as soon as I turn it over. I found this way easier to put together all right, so I really do want to know in the comments. Do you think the way that I did it was cheating, or do you think that it is a perfectly legitimate use of all of the resources that you have looked at?

There is a lot going on in the world the way that one girl on youtube, like does a brain teaser puzzle, is not a matter of great importance in the world, so i hope that everybody just kind of takes this with good fun and isn’t down there. Like actually getting angry about it, if you were to do this puzzle, do you think that you would flip it over and use the wood grain or would you prefer to just randomly put them in and hope that you stumble across the solution? Eventually? Can you think of any other strategies that I could have used without turning it over because, as I said, you know the first 10 minutes that I was working on this? I was really just putting them in randomly.

I couldn’t even think of how to arrange them in a way where I knew for sure that I was making progress or not, but to be fair, I don’t do a lot of this type of packing puzzle. So maybe there are some of you out there who do these a lot? Who can share some tips? I would love to hear them. There were a lot of questions for the comments who knew that, like a 20-piece puzzle, could elicit such discussion.

So, if you’re watching all the way to the end, you need a code word for the comments and i’ve had a lot of new viewers lately who have asked what the code word is for it’s, basically just so that i know that you watched all the way To the end of the video and that that means that you are my all-time favorite puzzler, so i think your code word will be um five because, as i said, there are five pieces within each puzzle piece. Oh you know what else this reminds me of. Is the game blokus? Has anyone ever played it? I used to play it in high school all the time. I hadn’t thought about it in years, and then I saw it on the internet, and I was like oh yeah. That was a fun game anyway. I’m gonna go watch one division, not sponsored, but I wish it was happy puzzling.

I will see you all in the next one.

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