Ravensburger - Disney Villainous: Scar 1000 Piece Puzzle

A gallery wall of framed scenes from The Lion King, with Scar's own portrait hung biggest and his claw reaching in from the left to straighten it. Around twenty-five pictures, no two frames alike, on a deep red wall.

What you are looking at

The large gilt frame at top left holds Scar himself, lit from below in green, which is how the film shades him. From there the wall tells the story in fragments: Mufasa in gold, Simba as a cub and again grown, Nala, Timon and Pumbaa, Zazu, the three hyenas, the elephant graveyard, the gorge, Pride Rock at dawn, the stampede coming over the ridge. Near the centre a small dark plaque reads Scar, long live the king. At the bottom of the picture a stone brazier burns, the only warm light in the frame.

The frames themselves are half the picture and worth looking at properly: gilt scrollwork, hammered silver, tribal chevron, zebra hide, leopard print, plain carved wood.

What it is like to build

Sort into frame pieces and picture pieces before you do anything else. This is the rare puzzle where "do the frames first" is literal advice rather than a figure of speech. Every frame is a different pattern and every frame is a closed rectangle, so a single frame piece tells you which picture it belongs to and which side of that picture it sits on. That is two pieces of information from one, and nothing else in the box gives you that.

Then each framed scene is a mini puzzle of twenty to forty pieces, with its own colour and its own subject. This is a very good puzzle to do in short sittings for exactly that reason. Finish a frame, stop, come back.

The wall is the hard region and it is the last job. Flat maroon with a faint texture, filling every gap between frames, and no cue at all except the shape of the hole. The flame at the bottom is the other awkward pile, because it is the only place in the picture with bright orange in it and it sits against near black.

Why Ravensburger for a licensed title

Made in Germany since 1891, no two pieces share a shape. On a dark image with a large flat region that is doing real work: when the picture stops helping, the fit is what tells you the piece is right. Thick board, linen texture, and a low-glare laminate that matters more than usual on artwork this dark.

Specifications

A little context

Villainous is the collector end of licensed puzzles rather than the supermarket end, and the format is what makes it: every villain gets a wall of their own story rather than a poster of their face, so the picture holds up across the ten hours you spend on it. We carry Gaston in the same 1000 piece format, and Worst Comes Prepared if you want the 2000 piece step up. The rest is at Disney.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.