Saturday, March 29, 2014

Finding the Jan Van Haasteren Crazy Golf Jumbo Jigsaw Puzzle in Derby

A long quest to find an elusive Mini-Golf jigsaw puzzle is over!

After much searching on our travels around the UK, Emily and I finally found a missing piece of our Crazy Golf collection as we spotted the Jan Van Haasteren Crazy Golf jigsaw puzzle by Jumbo in Derby!

Jumbo Mini-Golf jigsaw puzzle by Jan Van Haasteren
The Jumbo Crazy Golf jigsaw puzzle by Jan Van Haasteren comes in 1500 and 3000 piece sets

Derby's indoor market has a set of stalls - called Poynton's - consisting of a newsagent, a sweetshop and a treasure trove of jigsaw puzzles!

Emily is a big fan of Wasgij puzzles and together we've been hunting for the Jan Van Haasteren Jumbo 'Mini Golf' jigsaw since we spotted it in a temporary Christmas shop in Ipswich a couple of years ago (and we've rued the decision to not buy it then as it was at the start of a bout of Christmas shopping and we never made it back to the shop).

Jumbo Mini Golf jigsaw puzzle by Jan Van Haasteren
Emily scores a big win by finding the Jumbo Crazy Golf jigsaw puzzle by Jan Van Haasteren

Jumbo Crazy Golf jigsaw puzzle by Jan Van Haasteren
Faced with a choice of the 3000 or 1500 piece puzzles we opted for the 1500 piece one as we'd need to buy a bigger dining table for the 3000 piece one to fit on!

The puzzle has four titles - Crazy Golf, Midgetgolf, Mini-Golf and Minigolf - and depicts a very crazy miniature golf course! Emily and I might have visited over 550 courses on our Crazy World of Minigolf Tour, but we've never seen one as wild and crazy as the one conjured up from Jan Van Haasteren's imagination!

On another recent road-trip we visited the village of Easingwold and spotted The Yorkshire Jigsaw Store there. It's another shop that is worth a look, and while the Jan Van Haasteren Minigolf jigsaw puzzle wasn't in stock, they did say they could've ordered it in for us.

Back in October 2013 the team at Putterfingers put together a great blog post entitled "5 Reasons a Crazy Golf Puzzle is Great Fun!".

Related blog post:
- Jigfest 2012!

Links:
- Derby Market Hall
Poynton's
- Jan Van Haasteren's website
- Jan Van Haasteren on Twitter
- Jumbo Jigsaw Puzzles
- Jumbo Games UK on Twitter
- The Yorkshire Jigsaw Store
- The Official UK Puzzle Club

5 comments:

Richard Gottfried said...

Emily and I have recently found two more minigolf-related jigsaw puzzles.

'The Golf Course' 1500 piece Jigsaw Puzzle by Jumbo & Jan Van Haasteren has some fun Crazy Golf elements in it. Check out a photo of the box on the Crazy Golf Museum Twitter feed.

The 'World's Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle' - The Golf Edition has some great Crazy Golf bits in it. Here's a photo of the box on the Crazy Golf Museum Twitter feed.

Looking forward to seeing the finished puzzles (the 'World's Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle' sounds very frustrating - almost as much as a game of Crazy Golf) and hopefully finding more miniature golf puzzles in the future.

Richard Gottfried said...

On our travels we've found some more Golf jigsaw puzzles which show some wacky, crazy and mini golf scenes.

The latest are:
- A 500-piece Ravensburger Golf puzzle
- A 500-piece Page One Design Golf puzzle
- A 1,000-piece Gerold Como Golf puzzle

Richard Gottfried said...

National Puzzle Day is on Thursday 29 January 2015.

Richard Gottfried said...

For National Puzzle Day 2015 here's a snap of the completed Jan Van Haasteren Crazy Golf Jigsaw Puzzle by Jumbo.

Richard Gottfried said...

For National Puzzle Day 2015 Emily started doing the wacky crazy golf jigsaw puzzle by Jan Van Haasteren...

...she has reported that it's tough! There are 'edge' type pieces on the inner of the puzzle!?