Cosmo Digital

Looking through my list of puzzles you will see that I am a fan of the three dimensional ones, specifically those that were made by Wrebbit. Now that Wrebbit is more or less shut down, it is becoming harder and harder to find anything by them. Although I have a sizable list of puzzles from them that I desire to own one day, this puzzle was not on that list. Truely, I did not know it even existed until I happened to spot it at a thrift store.

I was not even intending to look for puzzles that day. I was helping a friend shop for shelves, and happened to wander past the puzzle section. I noticed the Puzz3D logo on one of the boxes, and immediately hastened over to examine my find. It turned out to be the Millennium Falcon 3D puzzle, which I quickly tucked under my arm after noticing the price was only four dollars. (in contrast, this puzzle sells used online for upwards of sixty dollars.) Having discovered one great deal, I continued to browse the puzzle section for others.

I would have walked past this Bavarian Mansion puzzle had my friend not drawn my attention to it. I was a little leery of it at first, as the box looked like it may have sustained water damage, but for only $1.89, I figured the puzzle was worth it even if many pieces were damaged or missing. I had another welcome suprise at the register: the Bavarian mansion puzzle was part of an ongoing "colored tag discount" the thrift store was having, and consequently only cost me 95 cents instead of the original $1.89.

Getting home, I immediately opened my new puzzles, and was somewhat relieved that the puzzles looked mostly complete and without any damage of any sort. In fact, the Bavarian Mansion puzzle looked like it had never been assembled, as many of the extra "junk pieces" with red dots were still in the box. Wrebbit 3D puzzles all come with many small junk pieces that are remnants of the printing process, and are too small for the manufacturer to remove. So it is up to the purchaser to first sort through every single piece of the puzzle, looking for any piece with a red dot on it and separating it from the real pieces. The fact that this puzzle still had the red pieces attached showed that it may have been opened one, and never assembled. My hope that the puzzle was complete and did not have any missing pieces continued to increase.

After finishing the tedious process of sorting through every single piece and removing the red dotted ones, I began constructing the puzzle in earnest. Like all 3D puzzles, I had to assemble all the flat sections first, then connect all the flat sections together to construct the three dimensional "model". Getting the flat sections built was fairly easy. I separated them in piles based on color, and this generally worked. The roofs were a little more difficult since most of those pieces looked nearly identical, but this too came together fairly quickly.

During this initial assembly I also got a pleasant suprise: all the pieces were there! I figured that one or two would have been missing, but the entire puzzle was complete. Even the small decoration pieces like the towers were all there. That made me quite happy.

Once I began assembling the mansion, I ran into a few slight difficulties. Foremost among these was the fact that the box photos and puzzle schematics did not show a few of the interior sections. In the puzzle there a couple of spots where there is a tunnel through the building or the bottom of a balcony. The sections for these have to be put in upside down, so they would be visible if you happen to look in the tunnel or at the bottom of the balcony. The problem here is that without any photos showing me which sections went here, I was guessing as to which square section went where. After a couple of attempts I think I got it correct, and the rest of the puzzle went up without a hitch. Some of the corner balconies and oddly angled rooftops were a bit difficult to fit in, but it seems that way with all the 3D puzzles I do.

I completed this puzzle over a period of two to three days. In all, I estimate that it took around four to five hours of labor to complete. I am still excited that the entire thing was complete, without a single piece missing. All in all, a pretty good deal for only 95 cents.



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