True Romance

My "True Romance" arrived Thursday night. This classic features artwork by Andrea Farnham (1991 copyright date) and the puzzle instructions feature a 1995 copyright date so this puzzle has been sold for at least 13 years.

Wow!

The artwork is lush and gorgeous consisting primarily of two "monsters" that you need to assemble, here's a view of the catalog picture:



My own take is that the artwork reminds me of something a touch out of where-the-wild-things-are, but with a different color palette. Very playful and fun and the fairly uniform yellow-orange and red-orange colors make a nice assembly challenge.

The puzzle is classified as (2 bolts) and has only one correct assembly. A most curious aspect of this puzzle are the instructions that read:

To make the last piece fit, you'll need to find the secret to true romance.

Ponder that one. At some level taken literally this puzzle is virtually unsolvable. Look at sort of mathematically/logic puzzle like, given any last piece you try to assemble into the puzzle, it will not fit unless and until you find the secret to true romance. So there is no correct way to go...

I'm still hunting for that:

Anyhow, the puzzle fell in ~45 minutes for me and was a real blast.

My one though is that in the context of 2008 and the Stave Trick lineup, this probably only constitutes a single bolt () at this point in terms of difficulty.