Puzz3D, The US Capitol: And My Miserable Experience with It

"US Capitol," Puzz3D, 300 pieces, 12 x 34 inches

I can't say that I wasn't warned. I read all the negative reviews, and I heard a lot of the horror stories about this particular Puzz3D puzzle, but I actually believed that with enough patience it would all work out in the end. Well, it didn't.

At the point pictured above, I was still pretty satisfied that it was going to work out great, and that I would end up with something to be proud of...I was even considering spaces where I could display it for a few days. And then, the bottom fell out of my plans.

These are the written instructions to solving "The US Capitol"...all of them. In addition to this there are almost twenty small diagrams showing how the pieces will fit together in the various sections of the building, beginning with the base - which looks like the driveways and landscaping surrounding the building. 

What cracks me up most about these instructions are the "Helpful hints," which amount to a warning to beware of static electricity making pieces stick to your clothing. It would have been really helpful to add a hint that the diagrams sometimes show a puzzle-shape that appears to be three separate pieces, but is in reality, is only one piece. Or that some pieces that appear on the diagrams to be one-piece, are actually two separate pieces. Too, keep in mind that all the pieces are shown in the diagrams only as shades of gray, with no indication as to what they really look like.

Here's a better idea of what the diagram sections are like. As you can see, there are no colors or patterns on the pieces - as shown in the pictures. That would be bad enough, if the illustrators had not found a way to be even more misleading by misrepresenting the pieces shown as mentioned above.

It was at this point that I decided I would be better off by just junking the diagrams, and began working this one more like it was an ordinary jigsaw puzzle. And for a while, that approach worked well, and I started to make some good progress.

It seemed logical to start putting sections of the wall together next. Most of the sections, as it turned out, were made up of nine-piece blocks, but a few were more simply made from three large pieces despite what the diagram may or may not show.

My confidence in the finished project grew with every section of the wall that I slotted into place on the base. Things were looking good, even though I suspected that the tricky part was yet to come.

My luck continued right on through getting the roof on the building and setting the open spot for the Capitol Dome in place.

This is the point where things began to go badly...so badly, in fact, that my frustration level caused me to forget to take any more pictures. There are three more sections of the dome, each progressively more difficult and fragile than the one before. I managed to get two more sections up, but the final section that adds the actual curvature to the dome structure just proved impossible for me.  

If the dome pieces had been limited to twelve instead of being cut into 24, this probably would have worked fairly well. It would have been simple just to cut deep creases into those twelve pieces where they have to bend rather than cutting all the way through. This is very much a trial-and-error kind of puzzle, and after those twelve pieces were placed, replaced, bent, and re-bent enough times, they started to fit very loosely despite being made of quarter-inch-foam backing. About the twentieth time that a pair of them came apart (often with the small piece falling inside the hole cut for the dome fit), I threw in the towel.

Oddly, the most frustrating after-taste I have of this whole experience is getting it 95% successfully built, only to fail miserably in the last 5%.  I would have much preferred to hit the impossible stretch early on; at least that would have saved me four days of messing with this thing for nothing.

Spend your money on this one at your own risk.