Doing a Double-Sided Sudoku Jigsaw Puzzle

Okay, so this is a jigsaw puzzle of a Sudoku puzzle and it’s double-sided and they cut it from the top and then from the bottom. So you can’t even tell which side is the top and which side is the bottom um. They claim on the box that this is the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle and I don’t think they’re wrong. Oh my god just look at these pieces. I think this is going to take a while, but before I get to that, I want to tell you about today’s sponsor, so today’s video is sponsored by puzzle peak and their jigsaw puzzle box stand, so you may have noticed that I never really feature jigsaw puzzle accessories here on this channel, and that’s because I like to keep jigsaw puzzles accessible.

I don’t want you to feel like you, have to go out and buy a bunch of extra stuff just to be able to do a jigsaw puzzle. But when puzzle peak reached out to me and sent me some of these box stands, I was just really impressed it’s inexpensive. It does its job really well. So I’m really happy to share these with all of you.

So basically, this is a stand to hold up your puzzle box, while you’re doing a puzzle so that you can refer back to the picture, it can hold almost any size box. It also has this extra little lip here to hold a poster. If that’s what you prefer to work off of, it comes in four different colors and once you get the box in there, it’s just really sturdy and I love these little puzzle piece cutouts, just an extra little detail, that’s so cute! So if you want to get one, I actually have a discount code for you. You can use karen15 for 15 off anything from puzzlepeak.com, including these jigsaw puzzle stands so a big thank you to them for supporting my channel go, send them some love.

The link will be right down in the description, so I got this puzzle from viewers actually named Sarah and Tim. They emailed me and were like hey we’re working on this really interesting puzzle once we’re done with it. Do you want it, and I was like? Yes, absolutely keep me updated and then, like two months later, they emailed me back and we’re like right.

So we couldn’t finish it. This was too hard for us. Do you still want it? Also? They are in England.

So just imagine that whole exchange, but with a British accent, which I will not attempt to save your ears, but speaking of England um. You might recognize the world’s most difficult puzzle, branding and the whole idea of cutting it both from the front and the back. So this puzzle was released by Paul Lammond games, which is a British company, but the exact same concept was released here in the us by buffalo games. So this was actually, I think, the first one that they released under that branding and then here’s one. That’s a little more modern from buffalo games, so they love this brand.

I guess this is an idea. That’s kind of licensed by different companies in different countries anyway, just wanted to clear that up in case you were wondering so now. Let’s take a look at the box and the pieces, so the front of the box really doesn’t give us a ton of information. Everything is here on the back. You can see that this is the final image that we’re putting together.

So it’s actually four different Sudoku’s. So the picture on the front is the exact same as the picture on the back, but on the back it is rotated 90 degrees, and so here is a little graphic of how they cut them. Um, here’s all of the info about that. So they cut it from the front, then they flip the entire thing over and cut it from the back. And that means that when you’re looking at the piece, it is impossible to tell which side is the front and which side is the back.

So on the box they say that it’s only 529 pieces, but it seems more like 4000. So here are the pieces, as you can see, we have edge pieces, but then all of the other pieces are the exact same shape. They have the two outs here and then the two ins there, which is kind of interesting because on the graphic they make it look like it’s all. The standard puzzle shape, but it’s a different puzzle, piece shape than it says on the box and then looking at the picture. We really only have three different elements in the whole thing.

We have these thicker orange lines. We have the thinner gray lines and then the numbers – okay, so I will admit I’m so nervous going into this one, I’m starting this on Saturday morning. I feel like it’s gonna, take me all weekend. I’M fully expecting it to take more than one day. I do have a few ideas on strategy, so I’m gonna do the sorting and then I’ll be back to explain how I think this is gonna go down.

Hopefully, without me ripping all of my hair out just take a moment to look at my hair because it might not be there by the end of this video okay. So the sorting took about 20 minutes and it’s looking a little crazy. A little overwhelming. I’ll. Be honest, I don’t fully understand the cut of this puzzle quite yet, but I’m gonna show you where I am so far so first I realized that all of the edge pieces are solid.

Ah, let me try that again. So first I realized that all of the edge pieces are solid white on both sides, which is always super fun. So I’m gonna leave the edges until last in this puzzle. Let’s just push those off the board entirely and I will get back to those later now in terms of the interior pieces. Let me zoom all the way in so you can see exactly what I’m talking about so for the purposes of this video, I’m going to call the curved edge on the side, the top bevel and then the straight edge on the side, the flat bevel.

I really hope on camera. You can see the difference between those two, basically, when the blade cuts the cardboard if it’s coming from the top it’ll push the cardboard down into a curve and then, when it’s coming from the other side, you end up with a like a 90-degree angle. Instead of a curve, so what I did to sort all of these pieces is, I found the alt prong that had the curved edge and I put that at the top, so that gave me two mirror image pieces. You can see this one has the curved um prong at the top, but the square is on the opposite side. So by doing that, I was able to break all of the pieces in half and I’m pretty sure it’s gonna go one from here and then one from here and then one from here and then one from here.

Basically, in a checkerboard pattern I mean that’s all I can imagine, because we have the exact same number of pieces in each group and I think it should be like a regular pattern that they cut out. So hopefully I’m right, I mean we’ll find out. As I start putting the pieces together, but that’s my theory going into it, but you have to remember the double-sided aspect so, even though I was able to break them in two, you can see that here the beveled prong is on top. But if I flip it over, the beveled prong is still on top and we still have the exact same shape. So what that means is that, as I’m looking for each piece, any of these could be flipped over, so I’m gonna have to keep it checking the bottom of the piece to see.

If that’s what I’m actually looking for. So how do I even get started? Here’s what I’m thinking I’m gonna start with any piece like this, that has a number on it, that’s partially cut off and then I’m gonna look for pieces that have little bits of numbers on them. So hopefully I can get um a few good pairs. Put together after that, we’ll just kind of see where we are at that point, I might start referring back to the box to try to put the numbers in order.

So that’s the plan. Let’s give it like an hour or two and then I’ll check back in and let you know how it’s going just kidding, I’m back already um. I just really quick wanted to find like two pieces that go together just to check how well they lock together, and luckily they seem to lock together great, like I can just hold one piece shake it all around and the other one isn’t going anywhere, which is Good because I’m about to be doing a whole lot of flipping all right, so it’s been an hour and a half and honestly it’s not as bad as I thought you can see that I have a couple decent sized sections going already. So I realized that what I needed to do was sort the pieces a little bit more than I had initially. These are pieces that don’t have numbers on them.

These are pieces that only have numbers on one side. So when I’m looking for a specific number, I don’t have to keep flipping them over and then these are pieces that have numbers on both sides or like little bits of numbers on both sides. So I do have to check both sides. If I’m looking for a specific piece and then the same up here, these I do have to flip and then these I do not have to flip. So you can see in this section that the pattern of the pieces is pretty regular.

You can see this square goes here and then there and then there and then there. So I was right. I am just going back and forth between the two groups of pieces and that actually makes it a lot easier to find what I’m looking for, because I already know what direction the piece is going to be going in. It would come from one of these up here and I only have to look at this side of the pieces to find what I need. I hope that makes sense, I’m realizing as I’m working on this, that this puzzle just takes so much brain power trying to figure out which shape and like which direction the piece has to go and then finding which bucket of pieces I’m taking from it’s just like It’s a lot but having the reference image has been so helpful because I can basically you know, look at the picture and then know what number I have to look for next.

So that’s why this section is such a funky shape, because I started with like the three and the five and then I just kept moving up the picture and adding each number, as I saw it on the box and my puzzle. Stand is serving me so well. I just have this on the bench next to me, so I can just keep referring back to it. Oh, I will say also that my wrists are getting such a workout from just constantly like coming over here and turning over every single piece one at a time also, I definitely am having some issues with the actual cut of the pieces, not being all that unique. So pieces fit like they physically can fit where they definitely do not go, and so far that’s been okay, because there’s enough going on with all the numbers and like the lines that I can look really carefully to make sure everything lines up perfectly.

But I’m getting really nervous about all of those solid white pieces on the edges. I don’t know if I’m actually gonna finish that part. I don’t know we’ll see, I’m not there yet for now. Let’s keep working on all of this. Oh my gosh, so I just put in another three straight hours and here’s where we are.

I actually have a pretty good section going up here, so I’ve definitely made progress. It’s just been slow-going, so one of the first things that I did that really helped was all of these numbers down at the bottom, where there’s only numbers on one side, I arranged them by number. Instead of having them all jumbled up, I should have just done that from the start, and then it was just a whole lot of looking at these grids of numbers and you know trying to build them out towards the end. Oh, my god, towards the end, I started flipping over sections because I kept getting stuck and I was like well. If I flip it over, I might see a new like avenue that I can go down and instead I would find that like half the pieces were wrong, that when I flipped it over, it didn’t make like a full image anymore.

Also, I said before that the pieces lock together pretty well and that’s true when you have like two or three pieces together with a big section. They do not lock together well, and so I kept like flipping over a section and then a piece would come off and I would completely lose where it attached to the main section. So I’m definitely calling it a day right here. Here is my day. One progress not great, also something else that I noticed you guys are not gonna believe this look at this so down here in this Sudoku.

It’s not even a real Sudoku because they have two nines in the same square and in the same row. So I thought that at the end I would you know, solve the Sudoku’s, but I don’t know if they’re even real Sudoku’s, all right time to start day two of the double-sided Sudoku puzzle. It’s actually been a couple days. I wanted to take some time to really think about my strategy moving forward, because this is seriously advanced puzzling. So now that I have a relatively big section going, I am starting to understand the piece pattern a little bit more, so you can see that we have the big squares and then little squares on every other row, and that is half of the pieces.

Then, for the other half of the pieces, we have horizontal rectangles and vertical rectangles again on every other row. So now that I understand all of those distinctions of the different piece types, I did a little more sorting off camera so over here. These are the pieces that don’t have numbers on them, so you can see that I sorted them by little squares and then big squares and then also by pieces that don’t have gray lines and pieces that do have gray lines down here for these pieces. I was only able to sort them by no gray lines or yes, gray lines, and that’s because you can see how this looks like a vertical piece, but if I flip it over now, it’s a horizontal piece. So there’s really no way to differentiate the two, and I just want to note that even still I’m using that beveled prong as an anchor, so all of them are facing with that prong going up and then the other thing I did – and this is going to Be, so key, to solving this puzzle – is I.

Made myself a, little cheat sheet so as I, showed you before the picture on the box. Is really little it’s like maybe three inches tall, and, then when they show you how it looks rotated it’s. Partially covered up, so you can’t even see the entire image so trying to get my head around what would be on the front or the back by only using these two images next to each other I like couldn’t even it would like. It was just so hard to picture in my mind, trying to be like well, if this section is on the part, that’s the front, but then, if we rotate it this way this should be on the back. But if it’s rotated the other way, because the front was actually the back, then this should be on the front like it was just too much so instead I took a picture of the box and you can see that I printed out the design at about eight Inches by eight inches, so it’s a lot easier to see and I printed it out twice and taped them together, so I labeled it um up in the corner.

This is the front, and then this is the back, so I can stay oriented and now what I can do is I can actually look at it up to the light like up to the window, and I can see okay, if I’m working on this section here Now I know exactly what should be on the back, so that’s how I got these two pieces filled in because looking at the picture, that’s these two squares right here. You know they’re blank squares, so that could be so many different pieces. But if I flip it over, we can see that there should be a nine and a three on the back. And so all I had to do was find a nine and a three that went together and had blank squares on the other side and then they fit in perfectly and then I was also able to use that to find mistakes. So this section I thought connected down here you can see I have all the numbers in the right spot, but when I flip it over and look at the back, this configuration of numbers a nine, a three and a six that doesn’t appear anywhere on the image.

So I knew that something was wrong, so I’m gonna have to rework that a little, but I’m feeling so much better about working on this today. Now that I have my little cheat sheet to be able to check my work as I go, do you think this is cheating? Do you think this is going too far? I just I don’t know how else I can do this puzzle efficiently so that I can keep making videos for you guys and I don’t spend an entire week just sitting here staring at numbers and lines and just going crazy. So I know this.

Video has been a lot more explanation than actual puzzling um. This is definitely the most technical jigsaw puzzle. I’ve ever done, but I’m hoping that today I can make a lot more progress. So, let’s get back to the actual puzzling. Well, it’s been just over two hours and I made so much more progress than I was expecting.

Look at this. I’M like three quarters of the way done. I honestly could not have done it without this. It was so invaluable to be able to be like okay. I’M looking for a two and then to sort of put my fingers there, so I can turn it over and be like, and it’s gonna be blank on the back or to be like okay.

Here I need a three and then on the back. There’s gonna be a one like doing that. Just narrowed down the pieces so much more quickly and I was able to be way more confident about what I was putting in. So I have all of the numbers in place except for two fours, and these are driving me crazy, because I have been over this so many times the front and the back, and I can’t find where any more numbers would go. And I don’t think the box said anything about including extra pieces, but the next thing I’m going to work on are filling in all of these empty spots that have the gray lines on them.

So you can see that’s these pieces here and these, and hopefully, as I fill them in the spots that I’m missing numbers will become more apparent all right. So it’s been another like hour and maybe 15 minutes, and I’m almost done literally. All that’s left is the solid white edge, but I’ll be honest. I had so much trouble getting here. As I’ve been saying, these piece shapes are not unique, they’re all very, very similar to each other.

So if you look at this center column, like every other piece, looks exactly the same with all of these edges over here and then even in the middle. I was moving pieces around and I still have like a piece here that I don’t think quite fits there, but I can’t find any other piece to swap it around with so here’s what I’m gonna do right now. I have a second piece of foam board and I’m going to flip the entire thing. This is the moment of truth that we’re gonna find out like how right or wrong I was see if there any really obvious mistakes in the middle here all right. Oh no.

I forgot that I taped the board to the table. Okay hold one sec. Okay, here we go. This is the moment of truth. Okay, don’t all fall apart on me: okay, okay, okay!

I think I did it. I think I did it and ooh okay. Let’s see at first glance, it looks really good and I’m just putting it out there now. I really don’t think I’m gonna get all of the edge pieces in the spot where they actually were when this puzzle was cut because they are solid white and they all look exactly the same. But I just need it to be like good enough, like I already did the hard part all of the numbers and everything so the rest is just gonna be good enough.

I hope we’re all okay with that. Oh, but one more thing remember when I was calling out that they had two nines here on this Sudoku. Well, that’s definitely a typo on the box because on the puzzle, it’s actually a six and a nine. So I do think these Sudoku’s will be solvable. Oh, my god, it’s done.

I can’t believe I finished the double-sided Sudoku puzzle, the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle. As I said, I was not too careful with the edge. It’s not perfect, but I just can’t spend any more time sitting here, trying to rearrange solid pieces that are so similar to each other. There are too many puzzles to do in the world, so I’m just calling this one good enough, all right so before I reveal my final time. Let’s actually do our secondary puzzle, let’s solve the Sudoku’s.

Now there is something really weird that I noticed when I was like transferring them onto a sheet that you can print out. I already mentioned how on the puzzle, they had fixed the typo to change the six into a nine, but on that same puzzle on the box, the six is down in this lower quadrant, whereas on the puzzle, it’s up here on this top quadrant um, okay, so Disregard everything I just said, because I made a mistake: I’m sure this is obvious to all of you watching but um this six isn’t in the wrong spot. I literally just had these two pieces swapped. You can see that all of the lines seem to line up, but it’s really just that these two pieces were in the wrong spot and you can see that now it all lines up with what was on the box. The only issue was that nine turning into a six, so I actually have this as a free printable that you can get down in the description so feel free to print it out and then race against me solving all four Sudoku’s and start okay.

So it took me about 19 and a half minutes which uh felt like a lot, so if any of you decide to try, it you’ll probably be faster than me so back to that third puzzle. This is all such a mess you can see. I have two sevens here in this column. I have two eights here in this column, but I went back and I redid it with the six in the correct spot and then it is totally solvable so that’ll be fixed on the printable down below, but anyway, what you’re all waiting for my total time on The jigsaw puzzle nine hours and 15 minutes honestly, that’s a lot faster than I thought, especially considering how much trouble I had getting started. Getting to the end of the first day was already, I think, four hours and 45 minutes, so it basically took the same amount of time to get to this point, as it did to finish the entire rest of the puzzle.

But that’s really only because for the second half I had my little cheat sheet to be able to fully like picture and understand what would be on each side of each piece. I was looking for so without this. I think it would have taken a whole lot longer. Overall. I think this is a great challenge, especially if you’re into a very detail-oriented like technical puzzles, if you’re more into like beautiful, bright colors, then obviously not for you but yeah.

This was unlike any other jigsaw puzzle I had done before. It actually reminds me of those jigsaw puzzles that are jigsaws of crossword puzzles. There are a handful of them. I plan to cover some of them on this channel. At some point, I guess the world just loves combining their puzzles, but I do wish that for such a unique challenge as this I do wish the puzzle itself was a little bit better made um.

Obviously I wish the pieces were more unique so that they weren’t so interchangeable, and I wish the pieces locked together a lot more, since obviously they should have anticipated you having to keep flipping over big sections. But now I’m kind of wondering did I do like the easiest version of this world’s most difficult puzzle concept, because the thing that makes this easy is that you can obviously tell a 2 from a 5 from a seven. So once you know what you’re looking for it’s pretty simple to just spot those pieces and put them in whereas on these other ones, the images across the entire puzzle are so much more similar to each other. That, like would these be even more difficult. Looking at the pieces from the older version um, the pieces are actually way.

Thicker well, maybe not way thicker, but a bit thicker. They feel a little more substantial and the piece shapes look exactly the same with the big squares and the little squares and the horizontal and vertical squares, this more modern buffalo games, one I got from a viewer, it’s um actually already completed. So if I do it I’ll have to take it apart, but um yeah again, it’s the same type of pieces. These actually the piece shapes look even more uniform than the other two looking at that one, I’m actually a little um intimidated now. So I’d love to know, if any of you have done puzzles from this series, how did it go for you?

Did you use any of the same strategies that I did and do you think these would have been more difficult than the Sudoku one, but I actually think the gimmick of cutting this puzzle from both directions. I think that was really effective same with the gimmick of having the same image on the front and then rotated on the back. I’ve done a couple puzzles on this channel that claim to be the most difficult puzzle and honestly they’ve been totally doable. This one was as well, but I think it’s getting much closer to actually being the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle. So, as I said, tell me in the comments: if you’ve ever done a puzzle like this and if you have any additional strategies that you can share.

Also, let me know if you printed out this Sudoku and if you raced me and Hal, you did. I want to say a big thank you again to puzzle peak and their jigsaw. Puzzle box stand for sponsoring this video remember to head on over to their site and use code karen15, and you will get 15 off the entire site. So your code word will be um numbers happy puzzling and I promise the next puzzle I do on here will be a lot more colorful and beautiful to look at all right. That’s it from me.