Our puzzle designer Jef Bambas has been playing around with some Escher-esque tesselations for puzzle pieces the last couple of years, which tend to produce harder puzzle designs as the unusual piece shapes require a lot of focus to pair-up:
- Hasui Nocturne is a tessellation of fish pieces
- Hues of Zion is a tessellation of lizard pieces.
- Cathedral of the Changing Tides is a tessellation of turtle pieces:
Inspired by the challenge of making whimsical tessellations work as a a puzzle, another of our puzzle designers Danny Song figured out how to make a tessellation of wolves-baying-at-the-moon for our new Dragon Moon puzzle:
Some awesome night-sky and camping inspired whimsy pieces break up the tessellation here and there.
Here's a sneak peek (spoiler alert!) at what a baying-wolf tessellation looks like, and our very first-ever Elvis Presley whimsy:
Danny worked hard to make every wolf-piece unique, but some of the wolf-shapes are very similar in some parts, so this puzzle is really hard because you can make a few wrong connections (you'll know pretty soon because the next pieces won't fit, but you might have to back-track).
The artwork is a screen print by a pair of artists known as Methane Studios. You can check out all their awesome art at their web shop.
This looks like a really cool puzzle…love the Elvis whimsy! I have the fish, lizard, and turtle puzzles mentioned in the post. They all have been especially fun to work! The puzzle piece tessellations bring an extra level of enjoyment to the puzzles. Would it be possible to do a tessellated version using cats? Surely I’m not alone in my desire to see more cat puzzles…..either puzzles featuring pictures of cats, having many more cat whimsies, or one of these new types of tessellated puzzles featuring cat shaped pieces.