Challenging presents (Or: The Marauder’s Map from The Noble Collection)

(If you came across this blog post after a Google search and you need help with this puzzle, skip to the end of this post.)

Marco gave me a puzzle for Christmas—it might have been Christmas 2021, even!—that has proven challenging to say the least. I worked on it for months, off and on. This puzzle was one of the main reasons I bought a pair of reading glasses. A lot of pieces look like each other. Even though you can see two shades of brown below, if you put the pieces next to each other it was hard to tell what shade it was. It reminded me of the dress color controversy (Wikipedia).

As you can see, it doesn’t even fit in my Portapuzzle (see also bol.com) because it is much wider than it is tall. The puzzle measures 35 by 13 inches (89 by 33 cm). The official store where you can buy it is at Noble Collection.

Here’s a close up:

Along with the odd dimensions, another problem is that the puzzle doesn’t come with an extra piece of paper showing the puzzle at a larger size to help you put it together. It does come in a very awesome box, though. And don’t get me wrong. This was a great gift and definitely worth the money Marco spent.

Here are the two links I used to help me solve this puzzle:

Noble Collection’s UK website – if you click on the first box at the bottom of the page, you’ll see a close up of the puzzle. Click on it again to zoom it.

This Reddit image from user jnfranne. Note: click on the picture to zoom in further. This image was extremely helpful as you could see the lines of the puzzle pieces. It was also amusing to see that the puzzle I got was about 1mm off from that user’s – in my puzzle everything was a bit further to right. The image came from this post over at the Reddit “jigsawpuzzles” community.