Faraway Isles

 Chris Yates, 90 pieces. Yates' puzzles have a hand feel unlike most anything else on the market--very thick, individually painted, with a resulting fairly tight fit. This one has nice colors and a combination of small knobs and push-fit to create the image. It was a nice change of pace though I think I wouldn't want all my puzzling to be like this. (Definitely sad I didn't snap up his version of Clue, though.) 3/5

Veut d'est

Façon Puzzle, 272 pieces. Another borrowed 2-sided puzzle with roughly similar images on each side to increase the challenge. What makes this puzzle unusual and interesting is that there's some color line type cutting--but only on one side since the images don't match up. It made for an atypical-for-me back-and-forth type of assembly where I ended up flipping some sections several times. 4/5

Millipedes

 Curiosi, 324 pieces. Borrowed from a kind puzzler nearby; a new cutter for me. This double-sided puzzle gave clues to which side was which that I first understood without fully articulating. Smallish pieces; no whimsies. Nice round connectors (with split receiving sides). 3/5

The Wondrous Isle of Manhattan

 Liberty, 722 pieces. Definitely a challenge with lots of detail but relatively uniform within the land & sea. Also at least one hidden puzzle (may have been more; a lot more of the pieces that I didn't use had strangeness that could be attributed to having an alternate solution). Particularly interesting to me--what looks like a partial whimsy, something I haven't seen from a Liberty before. See the typing guy below. 4/5

bridge, no tunnel

drunk under streetlight

baseball

central image with swirly cut

ladies who lunch

check out the guy on the left at the chair--he doesn't have a full torso and the chair is weird. Maybe it's supposed to be a smoke-filled newsroom--they're both typing, I think--but I've never seen a partial Liberty whimsy, making me wonder what else is going on

alligators in the sewers

a slice

extra puzzle

The Beast King, Annie Waldusky

 Liberty, 445 pieces. Whimsy-heavy and relatively dark, this was a fun puzzle to do with at least one monster that looks like it might have come from Stranger Things. 3/5

possibly my favorite

another good one

wolf like me?

Bassin D'Argenteuil, Claude Monet

 Louise Barnard, 690 pieces. Huge (pieces are a bit larger than average for a puzzle of this piece count) and tight-fitting with a few figurals and a lot of split connectors, plus an image that required a lot of work--whether it was the print or the original, the colors only provided a very general guide for the area of the puzzle in which the pieces might go. A really tremendous example of a classic style. 5/5

a few of the whimsies

holds up when picked up by an edge

What's Your Sign?

 Stave, 805 pieces. Combine 12 1-sword Teasers into one box with a minimal knowledge of astrology, and it was a very fun challenge! Also, turns out that not all online sources agree about which flowers/trees/etc. are associated with which signs, so I was mostly working by process of elimination, once I realized that it was one flower etc. each. 7/10