4,000 Piece Puzzle - The World Map

Fantastic puzzle overall and definitely worth purchasing and doing! Took 14 days working every day and probably totaled close to ~70-80 hours of time. Piece quality is good, nice thickness, and no pieces were bent, torn, peeling, damaged, etc... Pieces fit together well and stay together, but moving pieces around will cause them to fall apart if you try to pick them up. Text on the pieces is clear and legible, allowing you to quickly place lots of places at least in the general area where they need to go, however the writing on the box is extremely small and very difficult to read even with great eyesight as others have mentioned, but it is possible. A poster would REALLY be helpful on this puzzle. Another thing to be very aware of is that the border pieces all contain a repeating pattern and border pieces will fit precisely with numerous other incorrect border pieces, so be extremely careful to make sure the pattern lines up perfectly or it will waste a lot of time and be frustrating at the end. Even paying attention I misplaced 4-5 border pieces and had to comb over the pattern to readjust them. This is the 1st puzzle I've not started with the border, and instead did the flags, and colored band just inside the border first, in order to have a 2nd point of reference to check that the border pieces are correctly placed and fit from multiple sides. After the flags and borders, I'd suggest sorting out the latitude and longitude lines with numbers as this will really help you place other pieces later by referencing them using them as an X & Y axis grid . Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn lines are also easy to sort out and give more reference points, as well as the mini globes and compass section, ship, and then I moved onto the land and finally the water. Definitely thought I was missing a few pieces that I struggled to find, but in the end every single one was there. Very rewarding puzzle and now the only question is whether to glue and keep it, or put it away to do again someday...

Wow! I ordered this puzzle during the Christmas holidays for half off the usual price, and I have to say it would be worth it at full price. I worked on it for 34 days during the pandemic without any help from others, except I did have to use a magnifying glass to read some of the names on the pieces. Part of that is my mid-life eyes, unfortunately, but sometimes the writing was just incredibly hard to read. I thoroughly enjoyed working on this puzzle and despite a few oddities, I have to give it 5 stars. You will find it frustrating that Educa's advertising on the box prevents you from seeing what the right side of the map should look like. I searched online for other pictures, hoping to find a clear one but never could. I have included a picture (sorry, it's not the best) of most of it. The other pictures will show that you should expect some pieces to fit together oddly; the edges do not meet. I also included a picture that shows how a puzzle piece can fit perfectly in a place it does not belong (usually obvious, but not always!). The latter is particularly important regarding the border - I had 4 border pieces that fit perfectly but were definitely not in their right place. You have to really pay attention to the design and sometimes, when you are tired, this isn't always so obvious. Again, there are some oddities with the puzzle but overall, it was a great accomplishment! If you love to puzzle, then you should not pass this one up. The finished product looks fantastic!

This puzzle was a joy to assemble - the pieces feel nice in your hand, fit together perfectly, have virtually no dust, rarely stick together in the box, and rarely lift up when you've been lying across the semi-completed sections to reach a different part. - This is not a technically difficult puzzle. The only thing that makes it hard is the number of pieces. The pieces are almost all the standard "two ins and two outs" shape, with a few internal pieces that are concave or convex on one side. There's so much detail in the map that almost every piece can be placed by logic, rather than brute force trial and error. - This puzzle has multiple identically-cut pieces. We found about 10 (including, as another review mentioned, some edge pieces) close enough in color that they were initially incorrectly placed. But we were never able to identify a pattern to the placement of paired pieces. - Geographical knowledge helps immensely, but working the puzzle without outside resources doesn't necessarily increase your geographical knowledge. I found I knew far more about where in the world things were after I used Google Maps to place things (particularly islands) than when I used pattern / color / shape matching standard puzzle techniques. Also, particularly for islands, Google makes things go a lot faster. - Also helpful: shallow stacking plastic food storage containers to hold various groups of sorted pieces. My dining room table was big enough for the puzzle, but not big enough for a piece boneyard also. - It took us not more than 100 person hours, but definitely not fewer than 80 person hours, over 9 days to finish. This is one where working it in big chunks of time is much more efficient.

This is a great puzzle overall. It’s a beautiful map that is very detailed. It’s a hard puzzle which is why I bought it. It required hours and hours of sorting, but’s that’s how I do my puzzles. One suggestion is to go to the dollar store and buy 4 sturdy project boards (not poster board, I mean foam core boards) and do the puzzle in quadrants. If you buy the right kind of board then the puzzle pieces won’t slide at all. Then you can stack the boards up and store them somewhere rather than dedicate a huge table to the puzzle for months (you’re going to need a really big table, the puzzle is bigger than two standard white folding buffet tables or whatever you call them. So a few criticisms that may be important to avid puzzle doers: 1) the puzzle is obviously huge, which is great but the company that made it uses a repeating pattern of cuts. I imagine they sort of had to because it’s so big, but I wish the pattern was more “randomized”. I’ll explain why this is a problem in the next point. So 2) the edge is a nightmare. The fact that literally 90% of the pieces have almost an identical picture isn’t the problem. That is hard but fun in a way. The problem is that if you have identical pictures, plus a repeating pattern of piece cuts, then you can have an entire strip of edge fit perfectly somewhere but actually be in the entirely wrong area of the puzzle, and not even know it. Anyways it’s not enough to ruin the whole puzzle but it’s definitely an oversight by the manufacturer. 3) the completed puzzle isn’t very tight. What I mean is most high quality puzzles, once they are done, are locked together and become one huge piece of cardboard. Another way to explain what I’m saying is with this puzzle you can use your forefinger and thumb and separate the pieces slightly, creating an ever so slight gap in the rows. Not only does this make it not feel as solid, but it makes it extremely delicate. If you plan on making portions of the puzzle on a separate surface or table, you’re going to have a really hard time moving and implementing that section into the main puzzle. And if you plan on framing this puzzle it will be a nightmare. 4) The cover picture has the company name and logo plastered all over the side, covering the exact picture that you might want to use as you’re making the puzzle, so you’re left guessing what’s under that section of the cover. There is no full picture of any reasonable size anywhere else on the box, and I couldn’t find a digital picture on their site which would have been a great compromise. Anyways I hate to sound like I’m bashing the puzzle. It’s nice, a lot of fun, and again the picture is beautiful. It’s very challenging which is why I bought it. But for $50 I wish that it didn’t have a repeating cut pattern especially on the edge, that there was a full picture available somewhere, and that all the pieces locked tight when it’s done.

I love puzzles and normally can accomplish a 1000 piece puzzle in a day. This puzzle was VERY difficult and took countless hours to complete, but I will say it is worth it. The details are amazing and the finished product makes for wonderful art to frame and hang. I strongly recommend using Google maps to help find some of the locations as the print on the box is very tiny and there is no poster included. Otherwise, well worth the purchase!!

At the time of this review, I am about 6 months into the puzzle. Keep in mind I have been sparingly working on it during the grind of the weekdays. The weekends are more favorable. The border pieces are SUPER similar down to 1/10 of a millimeter that makes me squint for a long time trying to get the piece on the correct edge. The detail on the pieces make it very bearable to deal with the daunting number 4000. They are also very good quality and I have only one piece so far that has done the "bend" Recommended for anybody wanting a real challenge above 1000 pieces!

My husband loves maps and we both enjoy puzzles so we were excited to receive this in the mail. We were disappointed with a few quality issues but overall have really enjoyed this. This puzzle is very challenging, as it is 4,000 pieces and many are the same color. However, there are sections like the flags and the equator/prime meridian which are relatively easy to assemble once you can find all the pieces. The puzzle uses fairly standard shapes for the pieces, though there is a little variation. We work on the puzzle sometimes in the evening to relax, and after a few months we are still working on it. The puzzle is difficult for sure, but not so much that it becomes frustrating or unenjoyable. We were looking for a fun challenge and found it. I wish I could give this five stars because the map image is lovely with nice colors and quality printing. However, when we sorted all the pieces we noticed that ~30 pieces of one edge have the cardboard backing separated from the puzzle image. We would much rather puzzle than glue pieces together, but my husband wants to frame this when we are done so we will have to fix the separated pieces eventually. I hope all the paper parts are there. We could have tried to return our puzzle for a different one but had already assembled some pieces by the time we realized how many separated pieces there were, and we wanted to keep going. My other issue is that the pieces don't interlock well, so if you complete a puzzle section and have to move it, the pieces will fall apart and you have to reconnect them. A note about the size: We have the perimeter completed and this is a huge puzzle. The dimensions listed in the product page are for the box, not the puzzle. I'd guess it's about ~5'x3'. It takes up our whole dining table, which we were okay using as a puzzle surface instead. Be sure you have a large surface to devote to puzzling before you buy this, as it takes a while to complete and does not move well.

I got this puzzle mid March 2023, and just finished it in mid June 2023. I would have finished it sooner but there were several incidents that involved taking apart areas I had done and re-doing them, and an incident with a puppy on the table eating some of the pieces. I HIGHLY recommend putting a length of felt underneath the puzzle, to stop the pieces from moving around. These pieces fit together loosely, so it might be a perfect fit, but since it fits loosely, it is hard to be sure that it is the correct fit. And, there are MANY false fits within the puzzle. What that means is there is a puzzle piece shape that fits exactly into a spot, but it is the wrong piece, there is another piece out there that is identical in shape but maybe has slightly different shading on it, that is supposed to go there. Watch out for the border, there are false fits on there but keep a keen eye on the swirl pattern, and the pieces will match up. Follow all dotted lines on their path to make sure the correct pieces are in the correct places. Make sure each piece is in the correct direction. All the little islands are tricky, because some are so small they take up less than one puzzle piece, so keep an eye on the overall shape of the section. I would recommend doing the flags first, then the border, then the cross section north south and east west lines, dividing the puzzle into quarters. I did the land pieces first and then the oceans, but even though it seems like the land pieces will be easy, there are still many difficulties. Overall you will have a lot of fun completing this, and it's cool to learn the geography as well!