Dog Walk | Galison Panoramic 1000-piece Puzzle Review

Today’s puzzle review is for another Galison, this time featuring the 1000-piece panoramic puzzle “Dog Walk,” with the delightful artwork of Hye Jin Chung. The artwork and the longer panoramic format really drew me into this puzzle when I saw it at a puzzle swap I attended. I loved the fun style of illustration and the colors that Chung chose to use and the varied selection of dogs. From the wrinkly bulldog, to the fancy pink Poodle and the dressed up Dachshunds, this puzzle was delightful to piece together.

As is typical with a Galison, this puzzle was the mid-range quality I’ve come to expect from them. ‘Dog Walk’ is a little different from some of the puzzles of theirs that I’ve done. While it had the same smooth finish and same puzzle greyboard that their square boxed puzzle designs use, the pieces were a little bit thicker and the fit was a touch tighter. The pieces were a traditional ribbon cut with a 2×2 format (two inner prongs and two outer prongs) that is common with Galison puzzles. I’m not a huge fan of the 2×2 piece cuts because I really enjoy using the varied shapes from other cuts to help identify which piece goes where. Most Galison’s with a 2×2 cut have two distinct shapes, and each shape maintains a specific orientation throughout the puzzle (eg. a long, thin piece that runs vertically along the puzzle, and a tall squatty piece that runs horizontally along the design). This puzzle still had two distinct shapes but their differences were less distinct so it was harder to determine which style of piece shape you were holding.

When it comes to assembly of this puzzle, I feel like I flew through about 80% of it. Each dog and the walker themself are so distinct that it was quite easy to separate each element’s pieces. It felt like I was completing 10+ little mini puzzles that combined into one. The whole puzzle wasn’t a piece of cake though. To start, the edge took quite a bit of focus as three sides of it were mostly solid road. The road has a repeating herringbone pattern and I encountered a fair amount of false fits putting it together. I had to take apart several sections and rework where several pieces go. Admittedly, I knew this was likely and I considered leaving the edge for the end of the puzzle but I really wanted to have the frame finished early because I find it’s quite grounding. After the edge, the assembly really took off and I was able to speed through the majority of the puzzle quite quickly. I only really lost that speed when I got the final dog, which I deliberately left until the end and that’s the largest cream-colored Poodle. I struggled a bit through the Poodle which was a fairly solid color with a few little lines to indicate curls of hair. The small amount of detail, paired with the 2×2 piece format meant that there wasn’t a ton to work with and that most of the pieces looked identical to each other. I was able to orient most of the pieces by determining that the line work ran in the same direction (little W and C shaped lines) which helped a small amount. I also focused on the thicker line work that shaped the dog itself. This helped me create an outline of the dog and then I just had to fill in it’s middle section.

With the dog finally complete, the only part left was filling in the road. It was easy enough to get rid of about half the remaining pieces by separating out all of pieces that still had the small portions of color hiding on the edge and identifying which element they belonged to. It was not so easy dealing with the remaining nearly solid color road pieces. The gray on black herringbone pattern that made up the road was equally repeated. Given that this puzzle had a traditional ribbon cut where all of the rows were generally equal in size, this meant that when pattern repeated it frequently cropped in the same place. Due to this, the pattern itself wasn’t a huge help for determining which piece one would need. I really only got through it by doing a thorough shape sort at the very end, sorting the remaining pieces by horizontally running shapes and vertically running shapes. This meant that I could immediately discount about half of the pieces just by determining if I was trying to fill a horizontal or vertical space.

The puzzling process was a bit of a contrast, with about 80% of it being really satisfying and easy and the remaining 20% being on the spicy side. I did enjoy putting this one together. I rather like when mostly easy puzzles have an element or two of spice but I think for this puzzle it was perhaps a little bit too far of a contrast. The majority of the puzzle was so easy that when I hit a harder part, it felt well…hard. I think if I was making recommendations, just changing the pattern on the road to be something a little more organic would have made this the perfect puzzle or at the very least, change the puzzle cut to a varied ribbon cut. Either way, it was a great puzzle and was fun to put together as is.

I think that this puzzle would be enjoyable for most people. This should be a moderately easy puzzle for most people but there are a few sections that I’ve noted above which are going to challenge some people. For those of you who enjoy challenging puzzles, you’ll speed through this one.