The Busiest Week of Buying Yet, and What Puzzles Really Cost Now

Hi Premium Puzzlers,

This has been the busiest week of buying since I took the store on. Seventy six lines came in, two hundred and seventeen boxes. Thirty five of those titles have never been on this site before. Twenty are ones you found sold out and are now back on the shelf.

They are spread across five brands: Falcon, Cobble Hill, Gibsons, Eurographics, and, cut and boxed in Queensland, QPuzzles.

Nine of the new ones

This week leaned British and nostalgic, which is where Gibsons and Falcon live: a record shop, a seaside pier, steam on a platform, a village show.

From Gibsons, Three Bridges Crossing is a 1000 piece at $39.99 with a dad, a dog and the trio of Scottish engineering marvels in it, which is about as on the nose as Father's Day gets. Seaside Souvenirs by Tony Ryan is 1000 pieces at $39.99, and Wings Over Portland is a 500 at $28.99 for anyone who likes wartime aircraft.

From Falcon, The Record Shop drops you into a 1960s listening booth and Morning Arrival puts steam on a station platform, both 1000 pieces at $36.99.

From Cobble Hill, Japanese Garden and Cafe in Cassis are both 1000 pieces at $32.99, one all blossom and koi, the other a French harbour full of colour. And from Eurographics, Wild West Country is a 1000 piece frontier town at $37.99.

Twenty titles are back from sold out

These are the ones enough of you went looking for that I bought them again. Eurographics came back hardest: Cupcake Party, Colourful Tea Cups, Portofino, the Irish Pub, Glass Garden and Main Street Market are all on the shelf again, and eleven more Eurographics titles were topped up.

Cobble Hill brings back Extravaganza, Back To School and the Christmas Flower Shop. Falcon returns The Dressmaker, The Vegetable Garden, Glenridding and The Dining Carriage. Gibsons returns Sunset on the Seine, Skating at Somerset House and the Kinkade Sunday Morning Chapel.

One thing worth saying plainly, because it explains a lot about this shop. I buy two to five of most titles, not three hundred. That means you see the words Sold Out here more often than you would on a bigger, blander store, and it also means a sold-out title is a signal I can act on. The twenty above are that signal working.

Five new Australian titles from QPuzzles

Five brand new QPuzzles 1000 piece titles landed, all Australian, all designed, printed, cut and boxed in Queensland: a laughing kookaburra painted by Robert Mancini, a superb lyrebird, the Brighton bathing boxes on Dendy Street Beach, an illustrated study of native flora, and massed wildflowers with no landmarks in it at all, which is comfortably the hardest of the five.

Have puzzles actually got more expensive?

Before puzzles I spent twenty five years in markets, and my doctorate is in the behavioural side of finance. So with everyone talking about the cost of living, I could not leave this one alone. I wanted to know what has really happened to the price of a puzzle.

The trouble with that question is that most price comparisons cheat. Brands change, packs shrink, last year's model is not this year's. A 1000 piece jigsaw has none of that. The same title in 2017 is physically the same object in 2026, which makes it one of the very few things in a shop you can honestly track across nine years.

So we took twenty 1000 piece titles that have been on sale in Australia continuously since 2017 and priced every one of them, year by year, from archived listings.

Recommended retail prices rose 24.7 per cent between 2017 and 2026. Prices in general rose 32.5 per cent. Which means a 1000 piece puzzle is about 5.9 per cent cheaper in real terms than it was nine years ago. A puzzle that carried a $39.95 ticket in 2017 would need to be $52.95 today just to have stood still. It is $49.82. Measured against wages it is close to flat. And a single piece now costs you 5 cents, up from 4.

That is a quieter answer than the headlines would have you expect, and I think it is the honest one. Nobody else in this market has measured this, so it is ours to get right or wrong in public. Read the Ravensburger 1000 Index in full, with the whole series, the method, why we used list prices rather than sale prices, and every limitation of it.

And how one is actually made

If you would rather read about the object than the price, we also published How Jigsaw Puzzles Are Made, which follows one from the artwork to the sealed box. The whole thing is cut in a single press stroke by a steel tool bent into shape by hand, and that one step explains most of what separates a good puzzle from a cheap one.

About the Father's Day offer

This issue carried a 20 per cent Father's Day code that ran for 24 hours only, and it has now expired. I am a father, Father's Day falls on Sunday 6 September, and it was the first time I have discounted the whole store. If you missed it, the new arrivals above are all still here, and the ones with two or three copies will not be for long.

We are also on Facebook and Instagram, sharing new arrivals and a fun fact or two every week. Come and say hello on both.

Free shipping on every order over $150, anywhere in Australia, including WA and NT. Near Bondi? Free local delivery within 6km, no minimum.

All the best,
Mike