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I'm often asked by speed puzzling newbies, what puzzle brands do I recommend to try out. Even though I do recommend doing a wide variety of all kinds of puzzles (with different piece counts, hard ones, wooden ones, round ones et cetera), this question usually refers to what puzzle brands have puzzles that are the fastest to do. In simpler words; easy puzzles in the size of a competition puzzle.
How doing easier puzzles can make you faster speed puzzlers?
Doing easier puzzles should be one part of your speed puzzling practice. Not the only part but definitely something to benefit from. I do consider speed puzzling as sports, so I always like to think about any practice from all aspects; mental, physical, and circumstantial.
Boost your motivation. It is not a surprise that with easy puzzles, you will reach your fastest times. This can be a great motivation. Most likely your personal best time record will be with an easy puzzle. I also personally like to do easy puzzles as a warmup one day before a competition.
Know your physical limits. Doing a puzzle requires a lot of cognitive skill. But it also requires fine motor skills, the movements of your hands and fingers, and some real fitness. I'm usually out of breath after I finish a competition puzzle. However, if you only do harder puzzles, you cannot really know what are your physical limits because most likely your pace of doing the puzzle is still limited by your cognitive skills rather than the physical aspects.
Fit a practice in your busy life. A speed puzzling practice is most beneficial when you do your chosen puzzle at once without breaks or other interruptions. This can be hard sometimes if you have a busy life, whether it's because of studies, work, family (or many of these). Easier puzzles take less time so they are easier to squeeze into a busy schedule.
One of the main things I see people ignoring when planning their practices is that... life happens. You cannot create the most optimal, perfect, efficient practice plan because most likely it will fail very soon because "something came up". Always be realistic and consider what else is going on in your life. I once said that if I had all the time in life, I do all my 500 piece Ravensburger puzzles one week before the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships. But needless to say, I do not have such time so I should already plan something else as my last week's practice for WJPC.
But let's move on to the puzzle brands I find most suitable for easy puzzle practices.
Happily puzzles - every sorter's dream
My average time for 500 piece puzzles is around 50 minutes. To me, this would make sense that I am able to speed puzzle 1000 piece puzzles in less than two hours. But no. I have not been able to do that until someone recommended me Happily puzzles.
It's important to note right away that Happily only does 1000 piece puzzles. Obviously, this is not the most common piece count for an individual puzzle competition - unless you live in the United Kingdom where I have heard they compete with 1000 piece puzzles even in their Nationals.
Most Happily puzzles are collages or at least some type of still life puzzles. You could think about them as a combination of multiple smaller puzzles. Even if you are not a sorter, this makes these puzzles very easy to finish fast.
In addition to being easy and fast to do, I personally really like their illustrations. They also give credit to their amazing illustrators like Harriet Thomas-Bush, Charlotte Farmer, and Holly Maguire.
My first Happily puzzle was *Beats. The next ones I waiting on my to-do pile are Stationery and *Hot Stuff.
Kärnan puzzles - hard looking images made easy
Kärnan is a Swedish puzzle brand. I ordered two of their puzzles by half-accident as a part of my Matsmart order. (Matsmart is a company that sells online food and consumer products that would otherwise go to waste). These puzzles got stuck on my never-ending to-do pile for two months because I thought their images were so hard it would take a decade to finish them.
I was more than surprised when I finished my first Kärnan puzzle, Göta Kanal, at a very fast time. I'm not exactly sure but my time of 46 minutes may even go to my TOP10 fastest time list of 500 piece puzzles.
And even more surprised I was when I did the second puzzle, Norrtälje, in 48 minutes. I was expecting times closer to 80 minutes for both of these puzzles. Especially for the second one that had pretty much a solid color blue sky.
I'm still not exactly sure why and how these Kärnan hard-looking images are so easy to do. The quality is great, the piece size is regular, and no glare (just my opinion). Of course, we all are different, and different types of puzzles are easy for one but not necessarily for all. I still must say that generally I'm not good with these kinds of images, except for this puzzle brand.
Ravensburger - the most common competition puzzle
Ravensburger is the sponsor for most of the speed puzzling competition, including WJPC and so far all(?) Nationals in many countries. They may even have the biggest selection of puzzles. I could not say that Ravensburger as a brand is the easiest. Some of their puzzles are really tricky. But I would like to point out some easier puzzles from their selection.
Postcards puzzles: *New York, *London and soon-to-published Paris. These puzzles seem to be easy for everyone. I know at least dozens of speed puzzlers who have their record times with one of these postcards. Postcards have also been used in WJPC every year since 2022, and I'm pretty convinced that the Paris one will be used this year.
Are you are person who is great with details? Try out some of the Aimee Stewart puzzles from Ravensburger. My favorites are *Cook Books and *Purrfect Peace. Lots of other brands have also bought licenses for her illustrations but as I'm not familiar with all brands, I will stick with Ravensburger on this one. For example, some brands may have funky pieces so it's not equivalent even with the exact same image.
Or maybe your cup of tea is the more traditional sceneries with sky, nature or buildings and that type of stuff. Well, there are lots of options for that too. Something I have done lately is; *Balloon Party. It's important to know your own strengths and weaknesses. There is always a limit to how well another person can tell you what is easy and what is not FOR YOU.
Easy puzzle is easy for everyone
What is easy for you, may not be easy for someone else - and vice versa. However, we do have some statistics that can prove what is easy in general. For example, the postcard puzzles that I mentioned before.
It's a trap to think that you would do better in a competition with an easier puzzle. Why? Because an easy puzzle is easy for everyone. And in competition, all that matters is your time and placement compared to others.
Last year in WJPC, I was in classification round F that had a panorama puzzle, *Summer Thunderstorm, from Ravensburger's Nature Edition collection. I would say it was maybe the second hardest puzzle of all classification rounds (right after the same collection's *Lupins from round A).
On round B they had New York Postcard. I could literally hear at the venue people talking about how they wished to have been on that round. They should have not. I would have had much greater time on that round but my placement would have been worse. I even tested this out on one of my YouTube videos.
More speed puzzling tips can be found on my YouTube channel Puzzle with Emilia. If you wish to have a better understanding of what is an easy puzzle statistically, I recommend taking a look at myspeedpuzzling.com where you can see other puzzler's times and also times per specific puzzle.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links in this article are primarily to US Amazon. If puzzle is not available in US Amazon but available in Amazon DE, the link is directing to the latter one. Those puzzles that are available on both sites, the Amazon DE links are listed below for my European readers.
*Nature Edition: Lupins, Ravensburger
*Balloon Party, Ravensburger
*London Postcard, Ravensburger
*New York Postcard, Ravensburger
*Cook Books, Ravensburger
*Hot Stuff, Happily
*Beats, Happily
*Paris Postcard is currently not available anywhere. It was earlier this year available for pre-order. I will keep you updated if and when it comes available again.