Review: “Travel Shelves” by Ravensburger, 9/10

Publisher: Ravensburger (Germany), published Fall 2014

Title: “Travel Shelves”, Artist: Aimee Stewart, 2000 pieces

OUR RATING: 9/10

With three new Aimee Stewart’s coming out from Ravensburger in 2015, it was past time to do last fall’s 2000 piece “Travel Shelves”.

Box Quality:

As always the Ravensburger box is sturdy and attractively designed. The back is a generic one, as shown below:

Sides:

The sides of the box show the image, Ravensburger logo, and piece count. Unfortunately, only one side has the name of the puzzle and artist.

Inside:

Inside the box is a bag with the puzzle pieces (in excellent condition, no damage, puzzle dust, or unseparated pieces). The only other thing in this Ravensburger box is a ‘guarantee’ sheet for missing pieces. Some Ravensburgers contain more goodies in the box, but not this one.

The Image:

Artist Aimee Stewart has done a number of these fantasy “shelf” puzzles with different themes. Two new ones from Ravensburger for 2015 are “Heroes and Heroines” (with famous literary couples) and “Fantasy Voyage” (science fiction/adventure stories).

“Travel Shelves” features a world travel theme with various travel-themed books and sections of the image representing different world locations.

I was immediately attracted to the color and detail in this image and the exotic travel theme. It’s also nice that it comes in 2000 pieces.

(Click on any of the images in this review for a closer look.)

Puzzle Quality:

You can see my Ravensburger brand comparison here. To sum: Ravensburger is our highest ranked brand. The pieces are good-sized and thick and the image reproduction is excellent. The pieces have a grid cut, but there’s a nice variety of piece shapes. You never think a piece fits where it does not. And Ravensburger’s “soft click technology” gives a nice solid feeling when two pieces interlock.

Above: America as represented by San Francisco and sunflowers.

Assembly:

This puzzle took a good amount of time of assemble given the 2000 piece size, about five evenings, more than twice as long as a 1000 piece takes me. It’s not particularly difficult since there are plenty of colors and shades of each color, so you can put together about 80% of the puzzle by referencing the box lid. There are some darks (especially the brown shelves) that took a bit more trial and error at the end.

It’s fun to see the book titles and little areas of detail as the image is completed.