Fathom, 200 pieces. This was a hard puzzle to rate. I settled on 4/5, which is a 5/5 with a 1 point deduction--that is, it was an amazing puzzle that I even considered bumping up to the Stave scale, but with one annoying feature that I think could probably be fixed in the next iteration. Fathom has made incredible advances in laser-cut puzzles that make them close to some of the special things you can get from hand-cut, but at a much lower price point. Here, the feathers in the peacock's tail fit together wonderfully, and although there aren't dropout spaces they're still teaser-like. (There are dropouts in the flower portion, which is part of what makes the puzzle really fun--it's a great combination of techniques.) The annoying problem is that the round connectors are still not quite as personalized as you can get with hand-cut, so there were about ten possible candidates that were just impossible to distinguish from the connectors alone (one or two are livable, but ten was too many for me). I ended up solving from the top of the feathers, not the bottom. I think the issue could have been solved with a little more wraparound on the bottom so you could have distinguished more of the bottoms with other parts than the raw connector shapes. Hopefully the pictures will make a little more sense of this. Anyway I loved it and this review should be considered a very strong endorsement with a very tiny caveat.
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| most of the feathers are two parts, like so |
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| separated |
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| but, unfortunately, many cannot be distinguished from the bottom |
