"Lion" Awake

Whoa it's December. What happened to this year??? I'm just hoping that this month goes by pretty fast too.. we've all had enough of 2020. Anyway, to wrap up the unofficial birth month "series" I was doing, this one was an unexpected one from my brother, and it actually turned out to be one of my favorites.

One of the things that only my friends know is that I am a compulsive collector. If I find something that I enjoy, I will hoard the shit out of it. Some of my largest collections are of shoes, candles, purses, cloth napkins, scarves, and jigsaw puzzles. Not sure if my bro even knew about my puzzle obsession; he probably thought it was just a cool gift, which is kinda the beauty of it because it was really appreciated. By the way, for any Disney fans out there, the Thomas Kinkade ones are beautiful.

Unidragon Wooden Puzzle - Mysterious Lion

Rating: A

We Summarize Things

Fun to build, unique, and makes a great gift!

Upon first impression, the packaging and the puzzle pieces themselves really nice quality. The pieces have about a 1/8" thickness and won't bend if you're (un)intentionally forcing pieces together. Unlike a standard jigsaw, the overall shape of this puzzle isn't just a rectangle and takes on the shape of the actual figure. The coloring and line work is also really beautiful and intricate. The little pieces remind me of my architecture days, designing little laser cut pieces. Ah, I will never forget that smell of burnt cardboard. In terms of appearance and design, this is a resounding A+. I loved the uniqueness of this puzzle and how intricate the design is!

One of my favorite things about this puzzle is that each puzzle piece is shaped differently, and most of them are shaped like other animals and plants. My favorite piece is actually shaped like a pineapple! 🍍 Each piece also has little cutouts in the middle adding details to the little objects. Some pieces have little spiraled cutouts and I thought those were the most fun putting together.

This piece is shaped like a turtle. Isn't that cool??

In terms of the build, it took 2 people to finish this puzzle in about 3.5 hours. It's labeled for ages 10+ and is definitely not a hard one, but the building experience is actually pretty unique! This puzzle felt easier to complete because the line work is so intricate and it was easy spotting where each piece goes when you reference the image on the box. There is nothing more frustrating in a typical puzzle than putting together hundreds of sky blue pieces that look the same.... Also, the shapes here helped too because you could see certain voids like "oh a leaf goes there" instead of staring at the same five shapes over and over again.

My one caveat with this puzzle is that the pieces fit very loosely together. I'm the type of person who likes to do the border first. Because the finished shape is of an outline of the lion instead of a rectangle, the edge pieces don't have straight sides. Instead, I found the pieces with thick black borders that made up the edge, which I thought was pretty cool. Once I finished the edge, it was a nightmare putting the rest together because the middle sections we've completed beforehand couldn't be lifted into place. They fell apart immediately and we had to fit every individual piece back in, which was annoying. The edge pieces once completed was also so loose that we didn't know exactly how it was shaped. Typically, if you get a rectangle border, it doesn't move and you have an idea of how big it will turn out and which pieces go where.

It's near impossible pushing different sections together.

Overall, this was surprisingly one of my favorite presents this year. The build experience was generally very pleasant with the bright colors and good quality puzzle pieces, so much so that I would want to look for other similar puzzles by Unidragon. As we are approaching the holidays, this would make a great gift for pretty much anybody! Highly recommend 👍