Jigsaw 6, Series 2

Another 99p job from the Oxfam Shop at Ewell Village - where I learn today that they actually check assemble the smaller puzzles they sell - that is to say 500 pieces and less. True, smaller puzzles are in a minority, but still not much of a business if you spend say 10 hours checking something you are selling for 99p, although it would explain why I have had so few missing pieces over the past year. Just as well they don't pay most of their volunteers.

The puzzle is from Empress (not net visible), my first such. A rather cheap affair of thin cardboard with the fit of pieces not being very positive. One is not sure whether one has got it right or not. On the other hand, it does photograph a lot better than most of my puzzles.

A fairly regular puzzle with the great majority of pieces being of the prong-hole-prong-hole variety, with the largest being perhaps twice the area of the smallest and with few if any of the pieces of the prong-prong-hole-hole variety. Four pieces met at the great majority of internal vertices.

Started with the edge, as usual, making a few mistakes along the way which required a bit of unpicking. I put this down to the lack of positive fit. Then the skyline. Made a start on the trees. Did the bridge line and then filled in the buildings and the bridge. Did the water. Finished the tree.

This left a reasonably large lump of sky with very little colour variation, rather less than the picture on the box had suggested. This, together with the fact that nearly all the pieces were of the prong-hole-prong-hole variety meant that there was very little to go on. I tried to be clever and pick out pieces from the heap but decided in the end that this was slower than systematic trial and error, which is rather quicker than one might think at the outset, particularly if one is tidy and arranges the pieces tidily. Rule: only attempt to place pieces in corners and one makes contact with two pieces. Good contact with one piece not enough, certainly in a loose puzzle like this one. Unless, as happens sometimes, there is something distinctive going on. Connaisseurs of rules will appreciate that this rule is only reliable in the case that one has finished the edge, this being sufficient and probably necessary for there always to be a corner hole to be filled.

However, despite all my system I ended up with two regular sized holes and two irregular pieces - that is to say one 1.5 unit piece (three holes and one prong) and one 0.5 unit piece (one hole and three prongs) which when linked together made up 2 one unit pieces (two holes and two prongs in the standard configuration). So the trick was to find two adjacent & regular pieces in the assembled part of the puzzle which matched the two irregular pieces. I could then swap the irregulars in and with a bit of luck the now freed up regulars would fit the two regular holes mentioned at the start of the paragraph. I failed yesterday evening, but found the solution at a glance this morning. A solution rather simpler than that I had envisaged the evening before, in that a suitable home for the two irregular pieces was made by enlarging one of the regular holes and putting the regular piece so freed up in the other regular hole. A small prize is offered to any reader who can supply a diagram to support this text.

Interesting that all my mistakes so far have been confined to a small portion of the puzzle and have been, in consequence, relatively easy to correct. None of them have chained around the puzzle, perhaps involving a large portion of it, which I would have thought quite possible, in theory at least. Perhaps the odds are against complex errors but I am not sure I have enough brain cells left to do the sorts of sums involved to check. Also left to the reader as an exercise.