Ravensburger Ancient World Map

You looking to find the "Ravensburger Ancient World Map" Good news! You can purchase Ravensburger Ancient World Map with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

Price: $59.95    

Product Feature

• Puzzleball is a unique puzzling experience- the next generation in puzzles
• Made of curved, sturdy plastic pieces
• No glue required
• Underside of each piece is conveniently numbered
• Comes with a plastic base stand

Product Description

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!

Ravensburger Ancient World Map Review

Pros:

-The pieces are made of thick plastic and generally hold together quite well. Although there may be individual connections that seem looser, they are more than made up for by other connections that are quite tight (sometimes ridiculously so, requiring some force to put together), so that the entire ball holds together nicely. The completed ball is quite firm and stable - after completing it, my wife and I tossed it to each other like a soccer ball. This is without the need for any kind of glue. In fact, we're novice jigsaw puzzlers and, after working on this puzzle on a lark, we're now working on a plain old 2D cardboard puzzle and really miss the firm fits between pieces that allowed you to pick up whole sections and move them around the table with ease.

-The included stand is of decent quality (it's metal and plastic) and works well - the globe spins on it just fine. However, you'll need to put a hand on the stand when spinning the globe to hold it down and stabilize it, since the stand is fairly light and isn't grippy on the bottom at all.

-It's fun and spacially challenging to build a spherical puzzle. You'll constantly have to be wrapping your mind around the sphere-ness of it to figure out where something goes.

Cons:

-As stated above, some of the pieces fit together very tightly and will require some force to put together. This may be natural considering what this puzzle is made out of, compared to the typical cardboard puzzle. But more importantly:

-The pieces of this puzzle are all stamped out individually, i.e. they are not made from a single globe that has been cut up. This is somewhat positive because 1) it allows for all of the pieces to be individually numbered on their backs (which they are), which lets you check connections to see if you have it right (sort of cheating), and 2) if there's any problem with any piece, you can contact the company and tell them precisely which one you're missing and they'll theoretically send you a replacement. In fact, one of our pieces arrived misshapen and I did just that. I heard back from the company (they wanted me to be more specific about which puzzle the piece was from), I responded, and haven't heard back from them again in the last few days.

However, it's far more a negative than a positive because it means that *the pictures on consecutive pieces do not line up particularly well.* This make assembling the puzzle more difficult (and occasionally makes checking the numbers on the backs of pieces practically required) and, given that the puzzle depicts some INCREDIBLY small illustrations and print, makes the finished product far less pleasant or else totally impossible to read/examine.

-The actual "map" portion of this globe is quite small - all told, it probably occupies only about a third of the surface of the globe - so, as a map of the world, this thing is nearly useless. The best it can do is broadly show where continents are in relation to each other, and even then the polar continents are missing entirely. The two "poles" of the globe are covered in just aesthetic illustrations, and so is a good third or half of the "mid-section" of the globe (the picture that you see on Amazon doesn't show that portion).

-Finally, due to the inherent difficulties of building a spherical puzzle, and especially because of the difficulty of fitting some pieces together, the final product will not be a perfectly smooth ball. E.g. sometimes you'll push a piece in a little too far but, because there's now no way to get your hand in there to push it back out again, you're just stuck. However, the final product is mostly smooth and certainly does look like a "globe".

Verdict:

Recommended because of the general fun of "puzzles" and particularly spherical ones, but not so much because the final product will likely displease you. If you're interested in this, I would strongly recommend looking at Ravensburger's "Earth" puzzleball instead, which should produce a far more useful/educational final product and won't have the problem of microscopic illustrations that don't even align properly. However, it looks like the pieces of those puzzles are stamped out individually as well, so some of the alignment problems may persist.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Ravensburger Ancient World Map" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Ravensburger Ancient World Map ...