Speed Puzzle With Me

4 hours ago

3 min read

Updated: 3 hours ago

The Athenian Marketplace 21st October 2026

I'm a simple man. All I wanted for this little vacation was an opportunity to puzzle without being attacked by my new freeloader. I had the house to myself one morning so I put Hacks on the big screen and got to work. Historically, 1000 piece puzzles can take me around 7 hours so that was the amount of time I budgeted.

I had my timer going while I was puzzling, but paused it when I took a few short breaks. I tried to pause every 30 minutes to drink a glass of water and stretch my legs and I'm convinced that this helped me go faster. The progress photos were taken during each of the breaks I took. This is a retroactive reflection of my strategy, since I always get so many questions about it.

Begin The Little Frog

I challenged myself to do 5 minutes of sorting at the beginning, even though I was itching to start with the rainbow, because duh. Look at the little glimmer on the floor, it was magical. I sorted by color: mushrooms, flowers, sky, and frogs. I worked on picking out the items that were only in the photo once, like the matchbox or butterfly wings. Notice how I didn't say edge pieces.

Gay:)

Rainbow and matchbox are coming along. I think I want to start with the flowers and the sky. It seems fun to put together the frogs and mushrooms but I think that would be harder because there are more of them, and just one sky.

The vibrant yellow horizon and pink flowers have been put together, which gives me a couple good chunks done. In the beginning, I am trying to assemble sections that are unique and stand out the most, or have the most defining features. I am also trying to continue to sort out pieces that I think will be next. For example, the red mushrooms really stand out, I am sorting those even though I do not plan to assemble them yet.

The skyline and the frogs unique features are coming along, as well as the edges in those sections. Most of the pieces that are left in the box are the grass or water. I want to save those for last since they will be the hardest sections.

I made a lot of progress this hour. Like A LOT of progress. The top border is together and the sky is pretty much finished. The bottom right corner is very completed, since the flowers and rock are pretty distinct colors compared to the rest of the puzzle. The green of the lily pads is slightly different than that of the grass, so that was the next section I picked out of the box and assembled. As the space around the frogs gets assembled, I am able to build their outlines and work inward.

This is where it becomes very apparent that my favorite strategy is actually to leave the pieces in the box and pick out specifically the ones that I will want to work on. Honestly, I get overwhelmed when there are too many pieces faced up and poorly sorted, because then I have to sort them again, and I feel like that slows me down.

Water and frog bodies were assembled. Those had a little more detail to go off of: the water is flowing in a certain direction and the frogs have bellies. Next will be the mushroom hats, but I will have to look more at piece shape than image there. It's kind of funny to me how the puzzle was in two distinct sections here and how much the people who insist on doing the border first would hate this. I don't care, race me.

There is a slightly more vibrant green for the grass that I put together. The last section is pretty much just dark green forest. These sections rely much more on shape sorting since the image doesn’t have much distinct details. This is the point in the puzzle where I dumped all the pieces out of the box.