Hey Puzzle Bomb family!
It's time to dive into the intricate design details of another Bumfuzzled; this time Bumfuzzled #24: Majestic Breach!
The Initial Idea
I've talked in previous blogs about how puzzles can start in many ways. Sometimes, I have a specific puzzle challenge or interesting cut pattern in mind. Other times, I have a theme or visual in mind, and the cuts flow out of that.
This is an example of the latter, where an interesting visual popped into my mind, and I set to work from there. Here is the first crack at this puzzle that I recorded:
Often times, my puzzles actually are like designing more than one puzzle. In this case, there are three very distinct areas of puzzle:
1) The ocean, which I decided to make rather turbulent to add visual and puzzling interest. The frothy waves make for really nice puzzling! It's challenging to draw, though!
2) The whale (more on him/her later!).
3) The sky, where this preliminary layout follows one of my favorite ways to depict a stratified evening sky, breaking it into distinct bands of color. I got this idea from one of my favorite pieces of art in our house. I'd take a pic if I was home (I'm writing from a coffee shop), but I managed to dig up one of the artist's Facebook posts from over a decade ago, showing the art print!
Detailing Some Sections
Since I'd already made a lot of progress on the ocean and the whale, I worked on finishing those sections next.
I love when the cut lines themselves can be used to further depict the subject matter! For example, this is a baleen whale, which has some pretty distinctive ridges running the length of its stomach.
I echoed this with the cut pattern here, and so long as that area is a light color, the cut lines will be pretty visible in the final result.
Some other details of this step:
1) I decided to split the water into two shades of blue for visual interest. However, when slicing up a puzzle, it can be fairly difficult to track which sections are which color, especially in a busy area like this ocean. In these cases, I'll often label the sections, in this case "D" for dark and "L" for light. There's still a need to break up these sections further at this stage, which is a fairly trivial step, but the main ocean layout was done at this point.
2) The biggest challenge of creating puzzle art is always making visually captivating art that also functions well as a puzzle, and is also interesting to assemble.
In this case, the long, smooth profile of the whale is not conducive to connections. A bit of frothy water dripping from his underside provides a crucial connector, plus some fun visual interest. The mouth and eye jutting in from the dark purple sky provides another. It is so satisfying to find ways for a puzzle to connect thematically without just adding a few tabs (which is sometimes necessary).
To the Sky!
With the rest of the puzzle pretty well sorted out, it was time to move to the sky!
I felt the horizontal stratification of color was interesting, but a bit boring both visually and puzzle-wise, so I added some bands that cut through the sky in a northern lights-like fashion. These also would functionally allow me to connect the sections of sky as well.
The rest of the sky, I broke into simple sections in a kinda sorta stained glass-looking pattern. My puzzles tend to be very intricate, so those chonky pieces are a bit off the beaten path for me!
Remember how I like to keep things thematic, not relying on tabs? I didn't see a way out of that here. However, this layout presented a great opportunity for a somewhat difficult interlock system, where some edges had no connection points, relying on adjacent connections to keep things solidly together. Many similar-looking tabs also makes for a nice challenge!
I have a file of standard tabs that I'll often apply digitally once I'm done sketching if more connectivity is necessary, but due to the subject matter and difficulty of this section, I felt it was important to hand-draw these, allowing for more variance and less of a rigid/perfectly geometric tab design.
The Sample Arrives!
Based on the dates of the scans I used for this blog post, this puzzle was about three weeks of off-and-on design time. I say this often, but I love designing puzzles at least a year in advance, as it allows for this more casual design pace where I'm not pressured to just crank out designs. I complete some designs in a matter of days, and some over several months.
This design was completed in October of 2024, and I ordered the sample this summer in advance of the final production that resulted in the October 2025 launch. Here's what arrived!
As Steve Irwin would say, "She's a beaut!". I'm proud to offer this one to you in our Fall 2024 Collection, in what is likely the last of our quarterly release model as we prepare for a subscription model in 2024.
Until next time, blessings to you all!
Chad aka the "Puzzle Bomb puzzle design guy"
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