 I'm pretty sure I was not the quickest one of the bunch. Hey guys! So this video is a little different and interesting because I have taken on another challenge and I know you're probably saying, Mandy didn't you just do an ultimate challenge with your haunted mansion puzzle? Like aren't you done with challenges? And I thought I was done with challenges but I got a message from my puzzle pal Rick from Rick's Nifty Puzzles and if you haven't seen his channel I'm gonna leave his channel link down below. And he asked me pretty much why don't we work on a puzzle together and see who finishes first? So after some back and forth we decided why don't we kind of start a new thing? Why don't we start a challenge where we're not actually racing each other? Because to be quite honest neither Rick or I have done speed puzzling before and I personally would like to try it one day but this considering what I just finished with with you know like the haunted mansion puzzle I needed something that was gonna be more fun and less stressful because you guys know that that last one really took it all out of me. But anyways this is gonna be a fun take on the speed puzzle challenge that was started by a lot of other puzzle youtubers that you know but not everyone likes to speed puzzle so we figured you know what why don't we start something where people who don't like to speed puzzle can join. So we kept the rules pretty simple we have to have a timer and the most important rule here was to puzzle as you normally would. There is no racing there's no stressing out to get it done within a certain amount of time and all it is really is to see who completes the puzzle first. Now if you're more of a fan of a casual puzzling experience hit that like button. Now on my side I announced this challenge on my discord server which if you don't know what that is I'm gonna leave a link down below to that video and it's basically my puzzling community that I've created and a number of the discord members also joined in on the fun. So you're probably wondering what puzzle did we choose? So the puzzle that we decided to work on is called Pete's Gambling Hall and this is from Buffalo's Charles Wasaki collection. It's 1000 pieces and it's 26.75 by 19.75 inches when it's completed. Now I absolutely love this image. Again I love Charles Wasaki I love his art style but there's just something about this time period in America that just fascinates me. Like if I had to pick a moment in time that I would travel back to I think it would be this time period. This is kind of like the cowboy pioneer error. I love this stuff. It totally reminds me of like Oregon Trail. I'm pretty sure that if I traveled back in time into this scene you know my first stop would be the bakery. I'm pretty sure they sell coffee too that's a must and then after making a quick stop at the general store I'll just trail back to my house way back in the mountain area. Oh I left my chimney on with nobody home that's not safe. You know what guys enough rambling let's open this box up and let's see how long this puzzle is gonna take me. Alright so we've already opened up a buffalo in the past so we kind of already know what we're dealing with here. I did pick this up use and it was advertised as new on eBay but um they fooled me which can happen sometime on eBay you just never know but anyways let's open this up and let's just hope that we have all of our pieces here so as most of you already know buffalo does contain a reference image in all their puzzle boxes and they're always fairly large which is awesome so it's been a while since I worked on a basic buffalo set so I'm really looking forward to putting this together. If you want to see my first review on buffalo I will leave a link in the description box down below for for that puzzle set that I think I did actually last fall or maybe before that I don't remember. Now I do have well I purchased recently my very first timer so I'm really excited about this because this is really nice and it kind of makes me feel like official or like a professional or something I don't know and the funny thing is I didn't buy it for speed puzzling I bought it for this challenge so at least now I have it for when I decide to start speed puzzling but anyways enough of that let's finally get into this set and let's see how long this is going to take me all right let's move on all right took me 30 minutes and 31 seconds to sort everything here as best as possible. Actually you know before I move on I just want to say this was actually kind of difficult for me to figure out how I was going to go about sorting it which you know tends to be the usual with me really I think I have a plan before I start it and then I kind of like lose myself in the process and then completely forget about what I was doing but here's what I think I did so again first tray edges second tray these seemed like pieces that were more towards the top of the image here so we have like the mountains of the sky the next tray here are any pieces that had any letters words or anything like that this tray it's very sparse because honestly I didn't know what I was doing here but kind of like put in pieces that I knew what it was like for example this tower here which is probably the only thing that's in this tray anyways this tray I put in pieces that had any distinct trees or plants in them as you can see with some of these there's kind of a common thing detail going on here and I guess fencing as well I don't know this tray was well these two trays here kind of like a big pile of mess so for this one I think what I was trying to do here was anything that I believed had to do with the lower half of the image so there will be like carriages horses and I think it may have also included areas maybe that had the trees because to be honest it was kind of hard to tell some of these pieces apart so there's kind of like a hodgepodge there that and then this tray is pretty much anything with building details and there are some people in there as well because of you know you see them here standing in the building so yeah that's kind of like my my sorting here so how well is this going to help me I don't know but at least now I got an idea of what I'm working with so you know what in terms of where we are going to start I don't know maybe we'll just do the edges we'll see anyways let's move on all right so no surprise I didn't have all the edge pieces in the edge tray but that's okay some of it was a little tricky because you kind of have like all this sandy effect going up on the sides here but it was still fun I must say this is a nice change from the haunted mansion puzzle so in terms of what I'm going to be working on next in this process probably the tray with the letters in what nine see where I see if I could piece those together pretty quickly but again no rush I'm really going to enjoy this process okay let's continue piecing the letters together was pretty stray forward and then after that I figured it'd be best to just get straight into piecing the buildings together now that tray had the most pieces in it so I decided to separate or resort them by color but continue to piece together as I recognize where certain ones belonged and that's something I highly recommend you do when you have a fairly big pile set aside after your initial sort for me it really helps to become even more familiar with all the pieces and have a much better overall view and plan on what to work on next you know instead of just staring at a large pile that can seem overwhelming but again that's just me you do what works for you especially if you're not a sorter but anyways this became a little tricky at times because some of the buildings kind of had some similar tones or patterns to them but I think this was my favorite part of the puzzle because the image really started to come along and take shape fairly quickly for almost three and a half hours and I got pretty much most of the buildings completed now I took one of the trays I had a bunch of all these like trees with red leaves in them and there seems to be different color patterns so what I did was I kind of just separated them here so we got like the yellow background tones the bluey tone white tone and so on so I kind of group those together I gotta put these together this will be pretty easy I'm just sat on the other side of the table now but so far so good I'm really enjoying putting this one together this one is a lot of fun the only issue here is that I've made a mess on my puzzle table I've got piles everywhere and I try not to do that but it always ends up looking the same way no matter how hard I try to not make a mess but anyways let's continue now the trees with the red leaves were also a little tricky I had to move on to different areas at times just so that I wouldn't stay stuck in one spot but once that was about done I moved on to the lower half of the puzzle and again another tricky area because a lot of the pieces that were part of the dirt road look like they belong to the other trees in the image they had like a brownie fall colored look to them so that threw me a little curveball but I have to say I was a little surprised with the overall fit of these pieces I found my set to be on the crumbly side many sections would just not hold well together and I don't know if that has anything to do with the quality of the production of that particular year or what but it was a bit annoying at times but other than that the print was great and I loved the use of all the warm colors in this image this puzzle compared to my haunted mansion is definitely a breath of fresh air we got the whole well aside from these two pieces here bottom half done and now we kind of just have to do which what which is what I figured would be the hardest part which is kind of like all the sky and the trees and the mountains as well so we have to do all that next and I am hoping I mean I feel like I've searched pretty long and hard for those two pieces in my trays and I'm hoping that this isn't missing anything because that would really suck but anyways let's move on to getting I guess I'll start trying to sort out pieces into groups with similar colors and patterns and hope that will work to help finish this off in the next I don't know maybe hour or so but we shall see so then I went right to work on separating the tray containing anything from the top half of the image and the more I went through resorting each piece the more intimidated I started to feel now as I said I knew this would probably end up being the most challenging part of this puzzle but honestly I was not expecting it to get me the way it did but I've kind of reached a point in this puzzle where I I'm stumped and to be honest I kind of expected this to happen towards the end because the trees and the sky and the mountains I they look like they were going to be challenging but honestly I didn't think trying to finish this last part was going to take me as long as it has been and it's frustrating because it's it's only just a handful of pieces that I have left but I'm really struggling I've been struggling with this since last night trying to get these pieces in place I feel like I could have finished it last night but the problem was is that my lighting got really really bad I did a little bit of resorting on my trays for the last few pieces but as you can see there I kind of resort it by shape and hopes that it'll help me get through this a lot quicker so I have plenty of light from outside so I think I could just finish this now let's move on so resorting by shaped is really what helped me to get through this in the end and that's another great way to go about organizing your pieces especially if they pretty much have the same colors patterns or overall tones now aside from getting stuck in some areas everything was pretty much going along great until I screwed something up right at the very end of course I had to screw up the timer the very last few seconds but anyways it's going to be close enough now good thing I had my timer set up in a way that it was visible the entire time throughout filming so I was able to track back on the time it was set to before I screwed it all up but if my maths is correct this puzzle took me six hours 59 minutes and 22 seconds to be exact so seven hours pretty much in the end and thankfully all the pieces were there well that was fun I have to say I kind of expected to finish it a little quicker than I did I think that last part like the trees and the mountains that that really got me in the end that that's what slowed me down but again this was no race this was just sit back relax and puzzle away now on a side note I did try to save this puzzle you know like the way I normally do with puzzles without gluing them but you know in terms of the quality for some reason this buffalo set did not really hold on well together it was too crumbly so I kind of figured you know this is not really worth saving and just didn't bother in the end but that's okay because I kind of feel like this image is probably one that I would work on again and if not it's definitely one that I would probably consider donating now I'm super curious how long this took Rick to complete I'm pretty sure I was not the quickest one of the bunch but his channel link will be down below in the description box as well so that you can check his video out after this one and for the other members who joined in from my discord I'm also going to leave their channel links down below so that you can check out their completion time now if you've completed Pete's gambling haul or if you become inspired to complete it after watching this video make sure to leave a comment down below on what your completion time was thank you Rick for reaching out to me and for wanting to create something that the more casual puzzler can join I'm pretty sure we'll be doing this again at some point so be on the lookout for future announcements but anyways guys I have a huge list of other puzzles that I'd like to get done so I hope you're all doing well thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one