Product Description

The latest and greatest innovation from Ravensburger, this unique three-dimensional puzzle inspires a world of wonder among both kids and adults. It's specially crafted from sturdy, curved plastic pieces that fit securely in place to form a round, smooth ball. Once completed, proudly display it anywhere using the included sturdy metal V-shaped stand. No glue required. 540 pieces. Measures 8.5" diameter.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #766 in Toys & Games
• Brand: Ravensburger
• Model: MN056-184
• Released on: 2007-07-15
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 3.20" h x 10.40" w x 10.40" l, 1.95 pounds

Features

• Features perfectly crafted, curved puzzle-pieces
• Can be easily assembled together to form a solid, smooth ball
• No glue required
• Includes both a plastic base stand and metal rotation stand
• 540 piece set

From the Manufacturer
Puzzleball!! Perfectly crafted curved puzzle pieces allow for an exact fit and are easily assembled together to form a solid, smooth ball: with no glue required!! The underside of each piece is conveniently numbered so you take the easy or the challenging route for assembly. Each puzzle ball comes with it's own display stand so you can proudly display your puzzle prowess

Customer Reviews

great puzzle
I'm not a big fan of jigsaw puzzles (sure, they are fun, but I can think of more fun things to do with my time), but when I saw this thing in its assembled form at barnes and noble, something about it made me do a double take. It just looked so cool and unusual -- a professional-looking globe made out of jigsaw pieces with no internal support! How can it be so smooth? How can it stay solid? I hadn't even noticed that it wasn't a solid globe at first, when casually catching it out of the corner of my eye a few times as I was browsing the book stalls. It seemed like a lot of fun to make something like this, as was the prospect of testing my geography. My wife didn't see it as all *that* cool, but we still had a blast assembling this thing, though she only did the US, canada, and antarctica and only had patience for 30-60 minutes at a time. Trying to figure out which part of the world a given piece belonged to based only on parts of city names was a lot of fun. Watching it grow was great. Highly addictive, causes sleep loss. Took 3 days, maybe 4 hours a day. I would say the difficulty level is appropriate for adults and kids over ~12, or under 12 if accompanied by adults (unless it's assembled in cheat-mode where you look at the numbers on the backs of pieces). The pieces are hard and plastic, and interlock pretty tightly. It holds together pretty well during assembly, and is sturdy when fully assembled -- you can roll it around like a soccer ball (just don't kick it) and it can spin in the base very fast without breaking. It didn't seem quite as smooth as in the store -- some pieces jotted out by a fraction of a mm, but it does look perfectly smooth from a distance. My only qualm is that the printing on some adjacent pieces was slightly misaligned (< 1mm) and that some ocean pieces are completely identical, so that the only way to distinguish them is by the numbers in the back. But it's actually perfectly useable as a regular, fairly detailed globe and especially as a cool decoration! I'll probably eventually get some of their other ones, such as the globe of the night sky.

Excellent product!!
My 9-year old daughter and I have had a wonderful experience with this puzzle. She started out using the numbers on the back of the pieces, but I convinced her to use her regular puzzle skills to assemble the globe. We've both learned a thing or two about geography! I chose the Ravensburger brand because of its quality and durability; I wasn't disappointed. I definitely recommend this product to others.

Old Guy's toy
We love maps and globes. Our family room is full of them. This is just the latest addition to the decor. It was fun to put together. I'm not sure how kid friendly it is but it is really old guy friendly.