If you'd like to add to that collection by sending me - timfstone at gmail dot com - a hi-res puzzle-suitable pic or two, then, please, be my guest. Using screenshots and pics from old books, I've already amassed a small collection of handmade jigsaws ( playable here without registration or downloads). What I was thinking was that you, me, and him over there in the Fallschirmjäger jump smock, could work together to create a puzzle repository guaranteed to please Flare Path readers. If you're a wargamer or simmer looking to pamper your peepers with an attractive/unusual depiction of an aerodyne, AFV, ship, loco or battle, you can find yourself doing a lot of tag searching and thumbnail perusing, hence my Flare Path Jigsaw Club notion. Where it's less strong is in the transport, war, and history areas. The size of an up-ended B-52 hangar, Jigsaw Planet's puzzle cupboard bulges with images of exotic landscapes, gaudy blooms, and stilted still lifes. Personally, I'm not a fan of the one-click piece arranging shortcut, relishing the routine and rigmarole of hand-sorting, but with high piece counts screen edges are often clogged with cardboard at the start of a session, so I can understand the reason for its presence. Margaret of Drabble will ever utilize the site's 'ghost image' or 'find side pieces' cheats, the ability to play with a faint puzzle outline visible and all pieces 'the right way up' can prove hard to resist. Though no self-respecting disciple of St. The ability to customise piece totals (24-300) and play with rotatable pieces, means a puzzle you blast through in a couple of minutes one day, can easily consume a couple of hours on another occasion. Free and unfussy, I like the fact that this Czech-run establishment doesn't force me to imbibe advertisements as I interlock. Several sites offer impressively large puzzle selections, limitless virtual work surfaces, and DIY jigsaw design facilities, but none that I know of are as well designed or equipped as Jigsaw Planet. Dinner tables don't get monopolised, charity shop labellers don't get mentally badmouthed when that 1000-piece Dambusters purchase turns out to be missing an astrodome and half a flak burst, and best of all, the PC-reliant puzzle assembler gets to fondle fragments of bespoke images. While the original unsimulated variety have their advantages (tactility, scale, communality.) there's a lot to be said for jigsawing in a digital environment. In a world in which we're constantly bombarded by bombastic visual stimuli, they encourage us to pause, scrutinise and dwell on detail, texture, and colour. Rule, bug and frustration free, they quietly turn users into consulting detectives, painting restorers, recon photo analysts and air accident investigators. For my money, the most relaxing and satisfying of the classic puzzle forms, jigsaws deliver their myriad penny packets of pleasure in a way that can make alternative entertainment delivery systems feel awfully mean and contrived. When I'm not busy violently dismantling war machines via the magic of computer sims and wargames, I'm often to be found peaceably mantling them via the magic of simulated jigsaw puzzles. This week in The Flare Path I celebrate that age-old link by throwing open the doors of a jigsaw club specially designed for people who'd rather piece together aeroplanes and angry houses than kittens and kitsch cottages. jigsaw puzzles have enjoyed a long and intimate relationship with warfare and transport. Legendary Stalingrad sniper Vasily Zaytsev claimed they sharpened observational skills, improved manual dexterity, and helped alleviate tension in hospital waiting rooms. Charles Lindbergh completed eight during his momentous transatlantic flight. Sir Francis Drake was halfway through one when the Spanish Armada arrived.
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