Exercise your brain with jigsaw puzzles!
Decent cafes or bars should have games and puzzles for patrons to use. I particularly like jigsaw puzzles, so welcome to the Rick’s Café Noir jigsaw puzzle review page.
As children we learn many skills through completing jigsaw puzzles – thinking, social, motor, emotional – all at the same time, without realising it. As we get older, retaining those childhood skills are just as important. Exercising our brains by completing jigsaw puzzles improves short-term memory (which often fades with age), problem-solving skills, and helps prevent the onset of dementia – “use it, or lose it” has never been truer!
Every so often I order some jigsaw puzzles from pixels.com through my website, rpphotoz.com. These puzzles are excellent quality – printed on thick card stock like most jigsaws are (about 2mm thick, not 0.2″ as stated on the website), with a semi-gloss finish.
If you have a good image you can use it on a jigsaw puzzle, too – jump down this page to Use Your Image on a Jigsaw Puzzle.
Jigsaw Puzzle Reviews
Displayed below are the images used for a recent order of jigsaw puzzles from pixels.com. I will review them once I have completed them. If you would like to be notified when I post a review, please consider subscribing – you will not be spammed!
Funky Elephant
1000-piece jigsaw – Funky elephant graffiti in a backstreet in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
©2025 Rick Piper Photography. View a hi-res version of this image at rpphotoz.com
Bayon Faces
1000-piece jigsaw – Giant faces on the upper level of the Bayon temple, Angkor Thom, Cambodia – proving to be an insanely difficult puzzle!!
©2025 Rick Piper Photography. View a hi-res version of this image at rpphotoz.com
Istanbul Cat Houses
1000-piece jigsaw – Cat houses and graffiti in the backstreets of Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkeye.
©2025 Rick Piper Photography. View a hi-res version of this image at rpphotoz.com
Andalucian Tiles
1000-piece jigsaw – Decorative Andalucian azulejo ceramic wall tiles with floral motif in an apartment building in Cadiz, Spain.
©2025 Rick Piper Photography. View a hi-res version of this image at rpphotoz.com
Holden FB
1000-piece jigsaw – Interior dashboard of a restored Holden FB panel van from the early 1960s.
©2025 Rick Piper Photography. View a hi-res version of this image at rpphotoz.com
First review coming soon.
Use Your Image on a Jigsaw Puzzle
If you have a good image, consider having it printed on a jigsaw puzzle by setting up a free account on pixels.com, uploading your image, and selecting a jigsaw puzzle size. They make excellent gifts.
The sizes for puzzles are 24″ x 18″ (500-piece) and 28″ x 20″ (1000-piece), both with 4:3 aspect ratio.
The 1000-piece puzzles are considerably more difficult than the 500-piece, mainly because the area of the 1000-piece puzzle is only 30% greater than the 500-piece puzzle, but has double the number of pieces – the pieces in a 1000-piece puzzle are slightly more than half the size of the pieces in the 500-piece puzzles (approximately 65% of the size).
All the pixels.com puzzles are US made, with standard shipping by the USPS. Note that the shipping cost for one puzzle is the same as for multiple puzzles, which is why I buy several puzzles in one order. The puzzles I ordered took just over three weeks to ship from Wisconsin to regional Western Australia, via Chicago, LA, and Sydney – the time being about equally split crossing the USA and Australia.
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