Tonight we continue our conversation with Gus, a retired IT guy from New South Wales, Australia about what determines puzzle difficulty.  As many of you probably know, Gus is a pretty prolific writer, especially on the topic of puzzles.  So, in the not so distant future I will be sharing more of his thoughts on all things puzzling.  Hopefully you will find his commentary as insightful and entertaining as I have.

PM:  How do you define puzzle difficulty, Gus?

GUS:  To explain difficulty, I need to diverge a bit. I tend to rate things in groups, rather than try to define a specific place, or ranking order. The problem with ranking order is that it eventually becomes comparative, and you end up discarding most of the information anyway. What I mean is, say you are rating movies for example, and say you choose to use a scale of 1 to 10. What you will find is that two things will happen quite quickly. The first is that you will end up using halves, so you are actually using a scale of 1-20 (eg. you start rating 6.5 and 8.5) The other thing is that you will probably never score a movie a 10, after all, what’s perfect, and while you might score the occasional 1, you won’t really use 2, 3 or 4 much. Most stuff will be 6 or 7 or 8, so why bother with 10, and why bother with 20 (10 and halves!) But it gets worse, because what will happen over time is you will watch a movie, call it “A” give it say a 7, then realise that you gave a different movie, call it “B”, a 7 last year, and A was better than B, and since you can’t use halves… oh no, so does A get bumped, or B dropped! My solution fixes that dilemme, and can be applied to anything. In movies, it is…

1.       Didn’t make the end

2.       Made the end but only just

3.       Liked it

4.       Loved it

5.       Best movie ever, watch it

Easy now to rate things  They belong in groups, rather than trying to assess whether thing A is better than thing B. Thing A might be better than thing B, but if they were both approximately the same level of enjoyment, then they belong in the same group.

So…I rate puzzles: 

1.       Too easy

2.       Easy

3.       Medium

4.       Hard

5.       Too hard

Sure, you could reword these to be easy, medium, difficult, very difficult, and impossible, but the words don’t matter as much as their relative places.

PM: Very interesting insight, Gus. I have followed a 1 to 5 scale for movies and books for years because I have always thought a 1 – 10 scale was far too many. Your group rating does make a lot of sense, especially when it comes to puzzles and something I had never thought of doing – until now.

GUS: I tend not to do puzzles that I would say are too hard. They just aren’t fun, they are a task, a slog, and yes, you get the big reward at the end, but was it worth it? We all have our own idea of what constitutes difficulty, and mine will be different to yours, it is after all subjective, but how hard a puzzle is depends a lot on your level of experience. If a puzzle is too easy, it really isn’t much fun at all. I did one recently that was too easy, it was almost boring. The occasional easy puzzle is fine, but for me, I am more into medium and hard. Medium is good, hard balances out with easy 

I like to mix the degree of difficulty as well as subject matter, and piece count. It is worth noting that I mention piece count separately to degree of difficulty, because they are two different things. Many people seem to equate piece count with difficulty. That is not unreasonable by the way, because up until fairly recently, I would have assumed the same thing, but two things happened that made me realise they aren’t.

The first is that because of current trends (which we will delve into later) I found that there just aren’t any new puzzles to buy, so I had to do something I’d never considered before, namely, buying small puzzles, and by small, I mean under 3K pieces. I was doing a John William Waterhouse 3K puzzle at the time, called Echo and Narcissus. I would put it in my hard category, but it was very enjoyable. Then, since I loved it so much, I followed it with a 1K Waterhouse puzzle that I just bought, Soul of the Rose. I didn’t give it any thought when I first started, but as I was putting it together, I realised that it was every bit as “hard” to do as the 3K, and then the obvious next conclusion wasn’t a great leap. Same artist, same style of painting, why would it be any different, regardless of the piece count. Ok, obviously if you go to very low piece counts or very high ones, the difficulty is going to change slightly, but difficulty and time taken are not the same thing. Clearly, larger piece counts take longer, but that doesn’t mean they were more difficult. Difficulty to me is essentially “how easy or hard is it to put the pieces together?” Notice that I didn’t say “to look for a piece” because it is obvious that IF you are looking for “a” piece, then looking for “a” piece in amongst thousands of pieces is much harder than looking for the same piece among hundreds. I write all this to explain why I am saying a 4K puzzle (Oberhofen or Amsterdam) is harder than the 6K puzzles I mention doing earlier. In fact, I was recently doing a 5K puzzle (Educa 18015 – The Harbour Evening) while my visiting daughter was doing a 1K Eurographics puzzle (Eurographics 6000 0690 – Desert Dreams) and after swapping between the two, it was obvious to me that her 1K puzzle was way harder than my 5K. Go figure eh?

PM:  So, if it isn’t piece count that makes it difficult, what does?

GUS:  Two things, well, more than two really, but that can be for another time, two MAIN things. The image itself, which is pretty obvious and most people will get it, and ‘the cut’, which is more esoteric and deserves its own explanation, but that also can be dealt with in more detail later.

Editor’s Note:  The following paragraphs refer to the three difficult puzzles Gus mentioned in Part 1 of our conversation.  I am adding them again here as an easy reference point.

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Amsterdam: Suffice it to say that Waddington’s cut is very difficult, and when you combine that with a lot of sky, and the fact this is a painting, you end up with something that is approaching my ‘too hard’ basket. If this was say an Educa, or Clementoni, or Ravensburger, or most other (GRID CUT!) brands, then it would change. You put these three factors together (cut, sky, painting), you have a hard puzzle. BUT, I did this a long time ago. Not sure where it is or who I gave it to, but I no longer have it. I did luck out recently and score a sealed copy of it, and plan to do it soon. Whether now, with 35 years’ more experience I find it simpler, remains to be seen. For now, it is definitely one of the hardest I have ever done.

Oberhofen: Sky. Says it all. Solid. Blue. Sky. Lots. Brute force. No other way. I didn’t even use the pattern. If I was doing it today, I would.

Educa Gallery: A lot of brown. And black. And brown. The Educa cut both hinders, and helps, and that border was the hardest border I’ve ever done, bar none, without a doubt. Solid, unchanging, black, with a zillion interchangeable pieces, some that are so close, yet not, I knew at the time they were wrong, and planned to go back at the end and fix them. I actually forgot to do this, and it was only when I was tidying up my pics in Photoshop, that I noticed some pieces were in the wrong place! Moral: don’t forget to check your work at the end if in doubt 

To me, this was a very satisfying puzzle. It was hard, but not so hard that I couldn’t always put a piece or two together. It was just the right degree of hard for me. Immensely satisfying.

 A late edition is this 4K Tomax I am currently working on. Tomax 400-029 – Archduke Leopold-Willem in his Art Gallery in Brussels (4K)

I’ve only done a few hundred pieces, and it may prove to be the hardest of them all, which will clearly demonstrate a point if indeed it is.

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If you compare this Tomax to the Educa, you will see that while they are identical in subject (both “gallery” puzzles) it wouldn’t be unreasonable to presume that the Educa would be much harder, because it is both 25% bigger, and is a much darker and less detailed image. While both these things are true, what the box pics don’t tell you is the cut. The Tomax cut is diabolical, and that trumps the other factors.

Why is it diabolical, and why is this ‘cut’ thing so vital you ask? I guess we can deal with that in detail another time. ?

PM:  Fascinating! And I totally agree with you. I have often said I would rather tackle the 24,000 piece Life: The Great Challenge or the 42,000 piece Around the World puzzles than some of the really difficult photomosiac puzzles or the World’s Most Difficult double-sided puzzles that are 42x smaller and nothing but baked beans or blades of grass!

Thank you for your time again this evening, Gus.  It was a pleasure, and I look forward to hearing more from you on various puzzling topics soon.