Putting Bricks Together in the LEGO Paint Party Puzzle

If your family has been putting together jigsaw puzzles lately (like so many others!), here’s one to add to your lockdown list: the LEGO Paint Party Puzzle from Chronicle Books. Chronicle Books has a number of LEGO-licensed products, from puzzles to notecards to brick-shaped erasers, with several more on the way this fall (including some minifig puzzles that look fantastic). They sent me a sample of the LEGO Paint Party Puzzle to try out and, uh, I have to confess that I mostly put it together myself while the rest of my family wasn’t paying attention because it was fun to see it come together.

The photograph shows a collection of paint buckets, each filled with a single color of LEGO pieces, along with a few paint brushes and stirring sticks (which have some flat pieces on them to simulate paint). This may be one of the first times I’ve done a puzzle without putting together the border first—there’s a whole lot of light blue along the edges, but I figured that sorting out the pieces by color would let me assemble the buckets more easily.

That’s true to a point: some colors, like the lime green, are pretty easy to spot, and don’t look like anything else in the puzzle. But there are three shades of yellow and two shades of orange, plus two blues that look very close to one another, so some of the color piles got a bit more confusing. The paintbrushes and stir sticks were also easy pieces to spot, but it wasn’t always clear which one was which.

Once I got all the buckets assembled, though, I was left with a lot of what you see in the photo above: various shades of blue, some silver bucket edges, and the dark spaces in between the buckets. The blue portions—particularly the bottom few rows of the puzzle—were perhaps the biggest challenge, because I had to rely a lot more on the shapes of pieces rather than the image.

The result was worth it, though! It’s a really fun image.

This puzzle would be great for groups who want to work on their own sections of puzzle, because you could assign colors to different people and then assemble the buckets together afterward.

The one downside is that the quality of the pieces wasn’t fantastic—the cardboard wasn’t as solid as in some other brands of puzzles and had splayed out on some pieces, and there were some pieces (like the one seen above) that apparently got damaged either by the die cut or when the puzzle was broken into individual pieces. The pieces fit together well but were harder to pull apart, so breaking apart the puzzle afterward had to be done carefully.

If you’re a fan of LEGO and puzzles, take a look at the Chronicle Books website! The LEGO Paint Party Puzzle retails for $17.95 and is available from Chronicle Books, as well as some other retailers. So far this paint bucket puzzle is the only one available, but there are three more puzzles you can pre-order that will be released in late October.

Disclosure: I received a sample of this puzzle for review.