Awesome video! I totally agree with your rankings. I loved the detail on how the four of you puzzled with different roles etc. Nice music choice, too. I loved the picture montage near the end, too! I'm going to watch your video again!
Totally agree with your ranking Donnalouise. I am working on the Vampire castle and finding it really tricky and so much harder than it looks on the box, too much of the same colour.. OMG what did you do to the Dhama Dragon!!! 🤣🤣🤣
Oh no!! I had asked Alfonso about the point of making teams picked puzzles and he liked the added aspect of puzzlers needing to chose puzzles - how able they were at picking the easier/faster images for speed puzzling and what they felt better at doing. We debated about the houses as well and I am so glad that we didn't pick it - sorry you had frustrations with it.
@@fortheloveofpuzzles we predicted that the skyline would have too much shapesorting, but turned out we shapesorted A LOT for the houses too. We got a lot of screentime at the end of the livestream though and were the last team to finish within the three hours 🎉
The Vampire's Castle is my fave one out of all these. I hope it gets released in Australia. I recognized it from the Escape Puzzles series but hadnt done it, as Im not a fan of that series. Glad it got a revamped release.
I couldn't figure out what one needed to do with that Escape Puzzle - there were no instructions and it was not clear at all to me. Kind of frustrating... 💜🧩
My team was in a different prelim, but throughly discussed the puzzles from A. We immediately hated the cacti, but in the end we decided it might have been the best choice from that bunch! (We then purchased the England garden puzzle and put it together as practice!) We were thinking the vampire illustration would be a dark trap like the cow, but it seems like it was actually quite doable.
It's so tricky to know which puzzles to pick - but it's part of the competition I suppose. The one thing - the images on the box are often lighter and brighter than that on the puzzle itself so the cow ended up looking so much darker. I can't wait to build it with Alison.
I know it's super expensive to take extra luggage/puzzles/gifts back to NZ/AUS/SE Asia, and even FedEx/DHL would be expensive for each person individually. I've been thinking on that. If all of you from that area of the world combined FedEx/DHL all your freight to halfway around the world and sent everything to one person's house, would the combined freight split amongst you all be horrid? Once it gets to one person's house in that area, I would think additional freight on out from one central location in that area on to elsewhere in NZ/AUS/SE Asia wouldn't be horrid. You would have to plan ahead with everyone from your area, but maybe it's worth looking into for next year.
It's actually quite expensive to ship from Australia to New Zealand...and then I am not in Auckland but at the bottom of NZ. Just the headache and hassle to try and coordinate this would stress me out to no end. I'd rather spend that money on buying more puzzles and getting rid of the boxes. It really doesn't bother me and I was able to just sell a bunch without their boxes. People don't mind here in NZ because at least we get these puzzles and more variety. I do think next year I will pay for an extra luggage though.
Quite a mixed bag in the teams puzzles. Some were really quite nice but others were oo-er no thanks. The subtitles decided to mangle the word Valladolid and produced bad delid! I can only assume that the autocue or whatever it is couldn't understand what you said. Anyway you all had a great time and your team times were good. Look forward to when you are filming from NZ and can try out some of the puzzles with Alison.
I can't wait to get back to puzzling with Alison! We got together with friends and did some of the 500 piece pairs puzzles. I really want to do the Valladolid 1000 piece with her soon.
The difficulty of the prelim puzzles varied a bit too much between the groups, me thinks. I know it's probably not having an effect on whether you made it to the finals or not, but still, it would be nice to see the difficulty more evenly spread.
I agree that it probably didn't affect if a team got to the finals or not but also, it would have been nice for the puzzle difficulty and choses to have been distributed a bit better. At least giving Group A one of the illustrations to pick as well would have been good. The one I've noticed is that the images on the puzzles are much darker than on the box - I do wonder if they thought the cow would be a lot easier...??
In the pairs-round, I‘ve noticed in the livestream that a lot of pairs (if not all) with children were in group B getting the easy puzzle „Fairy magic“. Maybe in the teams, all children were in group C? I didn‘t watch those livestreams completely, so I can‘t tell. I think it makes sense not to give too difficult puzzles to pairs or teams with children in it not to discourage them.
@@andreadu452 We had a pair with a child sharing our table in Group A which I think was very tricky for a child to do. So I don't really know if they put more children in certain groups or not...??
@@fortheloveofpuzzles Interesting, I don‘t know it, maybe it was just a coincidence that I‘ve noticed more children in group B in the pairs event, I‘m not referring to actual data.
You knocked it out of the park!!!
Thank you!!!
Awesome video! I totally agree with your rankings. I loved the detail on how the four of you puzzled with different roles etc. Nice music choice, too. I loved the picture montage near the end, too! I'm going to watch your video again!
Thank you!! I had a lot of fun putting these recap videos together - the photos with everyone was the best! I loved meeting everyone.
Loved all the recap videos!!
So pleased you enjoyed them!!!
@@fortheloveofpuzzles Also loved the attempt at the pick up challenge at the end. I was cackling!
@@mionehaak195 You're very generous to call what I did an "attempt" hehehe
Well done❤
Thank you!!
Totally agree with your ranking Donnalouise. I am working on the Vampire castle and finding it really tricky and so much harder than it looks on the box, too much of the same colour.. OMG what did you do to the Dhama Dragon!!! 🤣🤣🤣
is the image on the puzzle darker than it appears on the box??? I certainly think this was true of the "Cow and the Flowery Headdress" puzzle.
@@clarkkent7973 Yes it is darker and the colours repeat throughout the puzzle. The only easy bit was the carpet at the bottom. 🤣
An issue with many Ravensburger puzzles lately - image on the box is so much brighter and lighter than on the puzzle itself. Throws you off!!
We picked the houses in C and I still feel gutted 😅 A bit sad how a split descision brought the most frustrating two hours of puzzling haha
Oh no!! I had asked Alfonso about the point of making teams picked puzzles and he liked the added aspect of puzzlers needing to chose puzzles - how able they were at picking the easier/faster images for speed puzzling and what they felt better at doing. We debated about the houses as well and I am so glad that we didn't pick it - sorry you had frustrations with it.
@@fortheloveofpuzzles we predicted that the skyline would have too much shapesorting, but turned out we shapesorted A LOT for the houses too. We got a lot of screentime at the end of the livestream though and were the last team to finish within the three hours 🎉
I just finished the "In the Magical Forest." It is such an awesome image, but more difficult than I expected (lots of brown and dark green).
I feel lately that many of Ravensburger images are brighter and lighter on the box than they are on the puzzle itself - which is a unfortunate.
The Vampire's Castle is my fave one out of all these. I hope it gets released in Australia. I recognized it from the Escape Puzzles series but hadnt done it, as Im not a fan of that series. Glad it got a revamped release.
I couldn't figure out what one needed to do with that Escape Puzzle - there were no instructions and it was not clear at all to me. Kind of frustrating... 💜🧩
My team was in a different prelim, but throughly discussed the puzzles from A. We immediately hated the cacti, but in the end we decided it might have been the best choice from that bunch! (We then purchased the England garden puzzle and put it together as practice!) We were thinking the vampire illustration would be a dark trap like the cow, but it seems like it was actually quite doable.
It's so tricky to know which puzzles to pick - but it's part of the competition I suppose. The one thing - the images on the box are often lighter and brighter than that on the puzzle itself so the cow ended up looking so much darker. I can't wait to build it with Alison.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Thank you so much!!
I know it's super expensive to take extra luggage/puzzles/gifts back to NZ/AUS/SE Asia, and even FedEx/DHL would be expensive for each person individually. I've been thinking on that. If all of you from that area of the world combined FedEx/DHL all your freight to halfway around the world and sent everything to one person's house, would the combined freight split amongst you all be horrid? Once it gets to one person's house in that area, I would think additional freight on out from one central location in that area on to elsewhere in NZ/AUS/SE Asia wouldn't be horrid. You would have to plan ahead with everyone from your area, but maybe it's worth looking into for next year.
It's actually quite expensive to ship from Australia to New Zealand...and then I am not in Auckland but at the bottom of NZ. Just the headache and hassle to try and coordinate this would stress me out to no end. I'd rather spend that money on buying more puzzles and getting rid of the boxes. It really doesn't bother me and I was able to just sell a bunch without their boxes. People don't mind here in NZ because at least we get these puzzles and more variety. I do think next year I will pay for an extra luggage though.
Quite a mixed bag in the teams puzzles. Some were really quite nice but others were oo-er no thanks. The subtitles decided to mangle the word Valladolid and produced bad delid! I can only assume that the autocue or whatever it is couldn't understand what you said. Anyway you all had a great time and your team times were good. Look forward to when you are filming from NZ and can try out some of the puzzles with Alison.
I can't wait to get back to puzzling with Alison! We got together with friends and did some of the 500 piece pairs puzzles. I really want to do the Valladolid 1000 piece with her soon.
The difficulty of the prelim puzzles varied a bit too much between the groups, me thinks. I know it's probably not having an effect on whether you made it to the finals or not, but still, it would be nice to see the difficulty more evenly spread.
I agree that it probably didn't affect if a team got to the finals or not but also, it would have been nice for the puzzle difficulty and choses to have been distributed a bit better. At least giving Group A one of the illustrations to pick as well would have been good. The one I've noticed is that the images on the puzzles are much darker than on the box - I do wonder if they thought the cow would be a lot easier...??
In the pairs-round, I‘ve noticed in the livestream that a lot of pairs (if not all) with children were in group B getting the easy puzzle „Fairy magic“. Maybe in the teams, all children were in group C? I didn‘t watch those livestreams completely, so I can‘t tell. I think it makes sense not to give too difficult puzzles to pairs or teams with children in it not to discourage them.
@@andreadu452 We had a pair with a child sharing our table in Group A which I think was very tricky for a child to do. So I don't really know if they put more children in certain groups or not...??
@@fortheloveofpuzzles Interesting, I don‘t know it, maybe it was just a coincidence that I‘ve noticed more children in group B in the pairs event, I‘m not referring to actual data.