Sandstone Church, Port Arthur

This was a bit of a ‘bonus’ puzzle, in that I bought a bundle of puzzles that I actually wanted on eBay and this was just included to make up the numbers.

The box was a bit of a clue what to expect, and had clearly seen better days - very thin, warped cardboard with corners that had failed and been repaired with tape so long ago that even the repair tape had dried out and failed itself.

Pieces - 2/10

The pieces were comfortably the worst quality I have ever seen in a jigsaw - not quite paper, but so thin they might as well have been. This made them tough to pick up, easy to bend and frankly just plain annoying.

However, they weren’t actually paper and they did survive me making the whole puzzle so I can’t quite damn them to 1 point.

Fit - 4/10

Extremely loose fit, which was probably greatly contributed to by the flimsy material. Because they were also very light, the slightest nudge of the table tended to pull pieces apart - especially as they were often slightly warped and so not sitting perfectly flat.

Not quite the worst I’ve seen - by the time the puzzle was half done it was starting to get some stability - but certainly up there.

On the bright side, taking it apart was a breeze!

Confusion - 4/10

The low differentiation (which is not always a bad thing) combined with the very loose fit made it all too easy to end up with pieces in the wrong place.

I had the edge of the sky wrong for a long time (not helped by the fact that the box image was cropped quite differently to the actual puzzle), because pieces that shouldn’t go together just sat very comfortably.

I literally got to the last piece only to work out that the reason it wouldn’t fit was because something three spaces to the right was in the wrong place.

Differentiation - 5/10

Unusually, the areas where you might expect to struggle - the grass, the sky - were well differentiated with shadows and leaves on the lawn, and plenty of crossing branches in the sky.

The pine tree background were frustrating, but not overly so and provided a decent challenge.

The mostly out-of-focus leaves was infuriating, because it was all at just the wrong scale to give you any real clue where anything went. It was this that drove a lot of the confusion.

Picture - 7/10

The picture itself is a rather lovely old building with lots of greenery and texture.

It loses marks for the over-use of foreground branches to add confusion, and the fact that the box image was cropped significantly different to the puzzle itself.

This is a common problem among jigsaws, but it was particularly frustrating on this one because it made the sky edge far trickier than it should have been.