 it kind of just felt like hey guys. So it's actually taken me quite a while at this point to kind of figure out since the last puzzle I completed you know what am I gonna work on next. And you know I picked up a lot of brand new sets recently and ones from brands that I haven't tried before. But I realize you know I have a ton of puzzles behind me and some from brands that I've never tried before. So I figured you know what today's the day we're gonna pick one from the shelf and we're just gonna do it. So the puzzle that I've picked this time that's sadly been set on my shelf for the longest now is one from Spin Masters Puzzles. And this one is called Gloria Rose General Store. It is 1000 pieces and it is 27 by 20 inches when it's completed. And the artist is Tom and Tonyshak. They do include a poster and on the back of the box it does state that these have a satisfying snap. Spin Master creates best in class puzzles of the highest quality. They use precision cut dies and advanced machinery to create unique puzzle pieces that fit together securely every time. Oh that's already getting me very excited. You know I love that kind of stuff. And aside from you know reading all that good stuff that they just mentioned I mean this image you know what this is this is reminding me of right. If you've been watching me for a long time now you know that this kind of style of image would you know immediately make me think of the Oregon Trail. I love that game. I know I always mention it but you know that that's such a classic for me and is super nostalgic. So whenever I see images like this from like this is like the times of the American pioneers. I find that that time period super fascinating. And this store is huge. I love general stores. You know I'm in there shopping for some good deals right. I mean look at the prices that they have here. Those are my kind of prices. And you know general stores tend to be one stop shops. So you know I'm going to be here for quite a long time possibly all day. We'll see right. But the scenery in the background looks amazing. We got some people and kids here going about their day. This is fantastic. But anyways in terms of challenge level with this image it seems like it's pretty straightforward. I feel like I can make a tray for the the store itself. You know the sky the scenery in the background people horses not too bad. But then again who knows. I might get sick and tired of it along the way. You know I highly doubt that but you know you never know. The more I look at it though you know it continues to give me those really big Oregon Trail vibes. It just gives me those feels and it's already me it's already putting me in a really good place. I want to see what this satisfying snap is all about and if it's even true and go from there. So you know what I'm going to shut up now. Let's finally get into this one. All right so let's get this one opened up. Now this brand does have tape on two sides of the box. So let's open that up real quick. All right. Let's see what we got here. All right. So we have our pieces in a plastic bag and here is our poster. Well that's a really nice size reference image. I like this and it's on good quality paper as well. So you know it's not going to rip easily you know which is great for a beast like me. And let's look at our pieces here. All right. So let's check out these pieces here real quick. First impression. I'm already dropping pieces. What the heck. Again first impressions here. Does have a bit of a glossy finish as you can see there. Quite strong. I guess it's I have a light shine an extra light shining over here. So I don't know if that's causing it but you know that's something to note whilst puzzling and who knows it might get easier as it moves on or different lighting might affect it. But anyways let's check out this print. All right. So the image print on these looks to be pretty good. The colors look pretty darn true to the actual image here. And because of that you know the print does look a little bit on the I don't want to say fuzzy or blurry. It's really not that bad because when you think about it the nature of this image is it's a painting. So you're not going to have exact you know clear details here. We do have a really good piece size which is always a plus and the print does also have what looks to be you know the actual texture of the canvas. You can kind of use that to help you figure out the orientation of these pieces. You know pretty much how they go on the puzzle. So you can line them up all that way if you're sorting them by shape and whatnot. I don't know. I think I'm going to get a better feeling idea for what this print is all about whilst I'm puzzling. But let's look at the quality of the pieces itself. Now to be honest I kind of feel like these are pretty darn thin and the tabs aren't exactly the strongest. So you know you can't really let your beastly force out on these. So you got to be a little careful. But with regards to that I'm curious to see how these pieces are going to hold together. Are they going to be crumbly? I don't know. We shall see as we move along this puzzle. So you know what guys? I better make sure I pick up all the pieces that I keep dropping. But so far I don't know. I kind of feel like I'm not really sure what to expect with this puzzling experience. But I do know that I do love this image and I think it's going to be fun to piece together anyways. So you know what guys? Let's get these pieces sorted out and let's start putting this together. All right this wasn't my most organized sort but that's okay. So here's what I did. First tray here we have all the edge pieces. This tray I kind of have a few piles set up and I'm probably going to disperse it amongst my other trays but I wanted to try these from this table. But this was mainly pieces that I you know obviously belong to the general store. So we have like a pile here for the windows. This is siding. This is like pieces of roofing. This is like the signs and some of the shutters. These are like the little fence areas and this is just a big pile of who knows what. I think what I did was I did any of the pieces that kind of weren't like objects. So we have like the barrels here. We have some supplies sat up top there. So I think that's what we got going on here. This tray looked to be for the sky. So we have all these light blue pieces. We have like this yellow going on here kind of for like this horizon right here. And some of these pieces are going to have like bits of the roofing and the chimney and whatnot. So that's the sky. This tray I don't know. I kind of just put anything here that had browns to them which could be basically anywhere from the image. It could be the dirt path. It could be any of the mountains in the back. I'm not too sure but it's all kind of like the same color scheme here. This tray are pieces that have people's faces bodies and whatnot and probably the horse's face. This tray we have greenery and we also have pieces here with the little river in the background pieces from this area with the house grass and dirt path which is that little pile there is not much but you know better than nothing. And then this tray I don't know actually these are all very very dark pieces and I couldn't quite make out where they belonged. It's probably gonna be from like this area here where you have like the dark trees and whatnot. So yeah that's that's what I did. Again like always I'll most likely be resorting as I go through it to kind of make the piles easier to work with. But you know what we got edge pieces here so let's get started on these and figure out from there what we do next. All right let's move on. So I ended up resorting the edge pieces to little piles with light colors and details and that helped me get through that fairly quickly. Then I decided the next plan of attack was piecing the general store together since I pretty much had most of that tray already resorted. I was glad I did it like that initially and that I didn't just toss all those pieces in one big pile in the tray. But anyways as the general store started to take shape I was already starting to summarize how this experience was going so far since I was already starting to notice a few things about this brand. And it also got me thinking about other brands that I've worked on. Ones I knew that were very comparable in price and where I could find them. And two brands stuck out to me the most and they are Seaco and Buffalo. I know I can find all three of these and like a Walmart or a Target and if I remember correctly all three of these range around the 10 to 12 dollar range give or take of course depending on the piece count but still kind of on the same tier level if you get what I'm saying I hope I'm making sense. I hope I don't start rambling aimlessly now but anyways for brand new puzzles I consider these very budget friendly. So what's the difference? Is there a difference? So far from my own experience they do have a number of similarities. All three have a good variety of pea shapes. I also kind of feel like the overall print quality is just about the same even though that was kind of a hard conclusion for me to make considering some images are blurrier than others. But then again that could just be because of the nature of the artwork glare level I feel is about the same. Heck I even feel like the number of damaged pieces you can find in your box are about the same. I had a few in this spin master's puzzle that were messed up and I know I've experienced that with both Seaco and Buffalo. Now in regards to the differences well that dawned on me when it came time to think about the overall fit and hold but we're gonna get into that later on in the video. Let's continue getting my shopping day piece together. Well we got some pretty darn good progress and I feel like I'm getting through this fairly quickly. Certain areas of the house is a little challenging but not overly. Now I'm just trying to figure out what section to do next and I'm I don't know I'm probably thinking about doing the background now because I feel like this area here I mean I don't know it might be easy it might be hard I'm not sure. But anyways I don't know I always think I have a plan on what I'm gonna do next and I end up doing something else anyways so you know what I'm just gonna keep re-sorting as I go through these trays again and hopefully we can finish stuff fairly soon. All right let's move on. Once I got the store for the most part done it really did start to get a bit challenging because I was starting to get left with pieces that pretty much looked the same especially those darker pieces that was a little tough but you gotta keep those puzzle juices flowing and figure out ways or tricks to get through those tough moments in puzzling. All right so I'm feeling like I'm a little stuck now so I figured the best thing to do would be to start kind of like lining these pieces up according to you know how they sit on the puzzle and this is definitely one of those puzzles where it's pretty easy to kind of tell how they fit because you can kind of see these lines going from left to right here across the image and I think I mentioned this earlier in the video but I think this has to do with the canvas of the painting so yeah you can kind of see like that small pattern going from left to right there on these pieces and it's on all of them it's harder to see on the much darker pieces but here's another one you can kind of see the lines there again and that just kind of helps you you know kind of gives you a little hint as to how they set so yeah I kind of just took some pieces that were in one of my blue trays and kind of just laid them out here because I'm kind of finding these trays to be a lot nicer because of the surface area that you have to work with and I could lay them all out and I can see them quite nicely instead of them just being in one big pile but anyways this has been an interesting challenge I'm kind of now trying to work on the dark areas I should probably try the sky or something like that I know I said earlier I was going to do you know like the scenery in the background of course I didn't do that but anyways any progress is better than no progress so let's just move on with this I must say it feels so good when you finally figured out a system to help you push through the completion process for the final stages I put in all the tricks I I did another resort by colors and tones even resorted them by shape and line them up correctly using that those canvas lines that I had mentioned and I must say guys look at your print and if you see those lines use them to help you figure out how those pieces are supposed to sit or fit is that the same thing I think so well this puzzle took me about eight hours to complete and once I popped that last piece in I was finally able to get my cheap shopping done and I walked away with a lot of good stuff and of course stayed way under budget too not surprising with those prices but anyways this image was fun and spin masters does have a number of good qualities to it the print was overall pretty good we got some great colors and what I can say about this which was a nice plus was that this brand does have a great number of piece shapes and the size is pretty good as well I did have a number of glare issues with it did kind of you know make it a little bit more challenging to see what was going on you know depending on where the light was coming from so yeah that's something to be aware of and overall the image was fun to put together it did have a number of challenging areas where you know the color scheme was kind of the same in certain areas but other than that you know I feel like the image is what you know really really made this a fun experience in the end other than that I don't really feel overall that the quality was extremely special now in terms of the thickness and I mentioned this when I was doing the unboxing but again the pieces weren't very thick so with that in mind I really initially wasn't sure what to expect during the completion process I was able to tell very early on that the fit wasn't very tight now overall piecing this together you know it was a little confusing at times because I couldn't really say that the overall puzzle itself held very well together in terms of like you know how I like to move sections around and whatnot some little sections would hold okay together but others would just you know fall apart and I don't know if that had to do with my puzzle surface I don't know if it was because it was snagging on the fibers and of course you know that I had to try out the pickup test and quite surprisingly it held up to it but when it came to the storage test it fumbled through that one there were numerous casualties as I tried to break it into sections but you know at the end of the day that's okay because this image I feel is fun enough for me to want to work on again in regards to what it says on the back of the box of you know the satisfying snap quite honestly I don't really know what they were getting at with that the pieces did fit okay together but I wouldn't say the snap was satisfying enough to make mention on the box quite honestly I don't even think I I felt any snapping sensation or or anything like that it kind of just felt like it really wasn't anything special I'll put it that way now as I've said I was super curious as how this puzzle would compare to other brands that are within the same price range and a couple of the brands that I'm talking about are seco and buffalo so yeah I figured you know why not compare them and figure out you know which would be your best value I guess you can say in terms of quality and overall experience now in terms of piece thickness both spin masters and seco are the same and buffalo is thicker and it's pretty obvious to tell when you have them lined up together you can see the difference and with that of course buffalo is a lot stronger in terms of piece size both seco and spin masters are pretty much the same but buffalo is slightly smaller now when you're looking at the fit and hold across these three brands seco as we mostly know sucks spin masters does hold better than a seco puzzle which you know if you look at it it'll it'll just fall apart in front of your eyes but of course compared to buffalo buffalo has a much better fit a much better hold especially compared to the other two so if I had to rank these three brands I have to say spin master really falls in between seco and buffalo with you know seco of course being at the bottom of the list but I hope this little bit of information can kind of help you decide you know when you're looking at a shelf in a store and you see these three brands and you're kind of thinking you know which one is going to be the better value in terms of quality if quality is most important to you but I'd be very curious to hear what your experiences have been like with spin masters puzzles have any of you experienced some of the same things that I did do you think seco well you probably don't think seco is better but do you think that you know compared to buffalo is it comparable to that brand or do you agree with me do you think is the lesser of the two again at the end of the day overall I kind of felt like this brand wasn't anything extremely special it really is at the end of the day one of the more budget friendly puzzle brands so you know you get what you pay for you can't expect you know amazing schmitt quality or robins robins burger quality at the end of the day anyways but you know I'm not mad for trying this puzzle out it did have some issues with the hold but that's okay at the end of the day it wasn't as bad as a seco hold which you know is always a plus but as I said the image was fun it made me think about Oregon Trail which you know is my favorite and I do look forward to trying another puzzle from this brand and see if I get the same experience in the end but anyways guys if any of you are looking for a place to share your own puzzle experiences with other puzzlers I do have a community that you can join and if you're interested I'm gonna leave a link down below so that you could look more into it and if you're new here and you want to hear what I have to say about other puzzle brands be sure to subscribe but anyways guys I need to get a move on with my next puzzle so I hope you're all doing well thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one