Double-sided Impossipuzzle - Golf Balls and Tees - Solving tips

Having enjoyed The World's Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle - Kittens edition so much, I enlisted my Mum to help me search for similar puzzles on our charity shop trawls. 

I was delighted when she recently found this one for me - Impossipuzzle - Golf Balls and Tees!

This jigsaw puzzle has 550 pieces. The pieces are large, so when assembled it is almost the same size as a standard 1000 piece puzzle. It's double-sided with a different image on each side - one side has repeating rows of layered golf balls, the other a scattering of different coloured tees. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the golf balls would be the easiest side, so this is where I started.

It was very easy to sort the pieces and assemble the edges, but this is when I got stuck. I just didn't know where to start! I spent several sessions just sitting and staring at the pieces trying to work out a strategy. I was initially thinking that I was going to have to do the whole puzzle just by piece shape.

But then I realised that you can use the shadows on the balls to work out which way many of the pieces should go. There are also white diamonds in the spaces between balls, and these always the same way up. I also noticed that many of the individual pieces had the same design on them, and I think this is the key thing to notice when it comes to solving jigsaws with a repeating pattern.

I began to group together pieces which looked the same, in particular those that formed the bottoms of the golf balls, using the dark shadow at the bottom to help. I was able to match up centre, left and right side pieces to make blocks of three which formed the base of a ball. These could then be linked to form an entire row across the puzzle.

I used the same strategy to add in a few more rows, sorting the pieces by the height of the black shadow on the piece. Each ball fits neatly across three pieces.

Once I had worked out this strategy I was flying! As you can see from the picture above, every remaining piece will attach to a piece of the puzzle that is already in position. It was pretty quick to solve the puzzle from here, using a mixture of shape sorting the pieces and the knowledge of the puzzle that I'd acquired so far.

There were very few false fits, and these were easily checked by flipping the pieces over and checking that they line up on the other side. Because of course the puzzle has another side, which to my eyes looks much more tricky! 

I flipped the puzzle over to take this picture, but I'm not sure I'll be attempting it from scratch any time soon!

There is a repeating pattern, with clumps of tees that are the same colour. But although the pattern is obvious when you see the completed image, it's much more difficult to see when you are looking at the individual pieces. I'll be hanging on to this jigsaw with the intention of giving it a go at some point in the future!