Artist: unknown
Made by: Hartmaze
Count: 253 pieces
Final size: 11.5″ diameter
Piece Type/Variety: Random, very high variety
Piece quality: Excellent
Skin irritation: Very minor
I can’t believe I found this nice wooden puzzle secondhand. It has a lovely scent of fresh wood, the picture is very bright, and the pieces are a nice sturdy thickness (made of three layers).

I looked up the painting online to try and find out who the original artist is, no luck there. Definitely a Chinese work of art, it’s from a fable. There’s lots of other images depicting the phoenix with a hundred birds. I tried to count them on my puzzle, got up to eighty but realized I missed a few as when I went to take closeup photos I saw more that were very small in the background. All that bold red makes it very hard to see some things. All the other images I found online were of other people showing off this puzzle. That’s how I found that some of them got a better picture guide. Mine’s rather small, as shown below. I had to actually use a loop to see where some of the birds were in the picture.

The image on the box is even smaller (that’s my thumb!)

However the other side of the insert has a map of all the piece shapes, this is more decent size. I don’t know if I’d ever use this to solve it (but then, I never imagined I’d find a use for lettering guides, so maybe someday, who knows). I was a bit annoyed to see that when some people showed their puzzle online, their picture guide was the size of my piece map. Would have been a lot more useful.

Just have to share some details, as I tried to recognize the bird species. There’s a peacock-

Two cranes-

A pair of geese and a rooster (his red body and orange beak blend into the background)

A penguin, an owl-

A kingfisher and a small toucan (it’s just above the phoenix to the right, between its body and wing)

What I think is a cockatoo, and a hoopoe-

This one looks like an cattle egret (but I think it’s probably not), and some kind of shorebird-

I think this is a bird of prey-

and these make me think of magpies, though they’re probably something else-

You can tell from those details above, there were quite a few pieces had the picture layer chipping off the corners. No puzzle dust per se, but a scattering of color flecks left behind on my board. I don’t know how much use this puzzle had before coming to me, but with more re-workings it seems the picture will start to wear off at the edges. There are no whimsy pieces, but I didn’t miss them. The quirky, intricate shapes were plenty challenging.

If I work it again, I think I’ll do it on this black board. It stands out so much better. (In my next-to-the-last progress photo, there are still 12 piece gaps, but it’s hard to tell).

Finally, the assembly: