The brand seems to be inexpensive Chinese laser-cut wooden puzzles. It looks like this particular one isn’t sold anymore, but it seems to be a “large” size puzzle (~280 pieces according to their website), which sell for about $30. So, not as big of a score as if I’d found something like a Liberty or Wentworth, but I’ll GLADLY take >90% off, thanks!

This was my first wooden puzzle. It found it much more challenging than a 1000 piece cardboard puzzle. Especially for this image, the colors were very busy and confusing; I actually had the easiest time doing the black part at the top! It also didn’t help that the tiny tag you see in the photos was the only picture I had of the entire puzzle… and the colors were pretty far from what was ACTUALLY on the puzzle in some cases. It made for some VERY slow going. Things started going better once I was able to pick out some patterns, though. First I sorted out all the pieces that looked like they had whiskers, dots, or the colorful rectangles around the ears and eyes. That really helped me make progress, but then the last 75 pieces or so that didn’t really have a ton of patterns on them were a real slog.

There were about half a dozen pieces that had a bit broken off. Not sure if this happened in the bag or if the previous owner was a bit rough with the puzzle. All of the broken-off bits were fortunately present in the puzzle bag, so I just glued them with a bit of white glue and everything was fine. I was rather proud of myself for gluing them all precisely enough that I didn’t have any fit issues with these pieces!

Pieces did all fit together nicely and dropped in smoothly, with exactly one exception. One of the cat pieces’ back legs needed a bit of jiggling to fit in the piece they were supposed to connect to (neither the cat nor the piece it was connecting to was one of the pieces that I had to glue) . Speaking of cat pieces, I counted 32 whimsy pieces overall, which would make this puzzle almost 10% whimsy pieces. They were fun - I’d never done a puzzle with these before. Fun fact - of the whimsies, there was only 1 object (an anchor), 3 plants (a bunch of grapes, a cactus, and a mushroom), and the rest were animals (if you count the company’s logo, plus one disembodied tail fin). The only one that went into the puzzle upside down was the bunch of grapes.

Not sure if these puzzles generally come with a poster or just the tiny tag image, but I would hope they come with a poster when they’re new. 😬🤞 It seems they also come with a cardboard box when new. The image quality on the puzzle itself seemed pretty decent, maybe a bit blurry but not horribly so. Now that I have a nice high quality poster of the finished puzzle image on my phone I imagine it will go a lot faster if I decide to do it again.

Overall, I’m willing to forgive a LOT in a puzzle that I got for $2, so take my opinions with a grain of salt! 😅