House of Puzzles has sent through its new season, and it is a wider spread than usual. Twenty-three titles: a designer we have not stocked before, two puzzles licensed from the Zoological Society of London's archive, two additions to the numbered series, and six Christmas boxes across four designs. Pre-orders are open now.
What has landed
The batch runs across five artists. Keith Stapleton and Tracy Hall take the largest share between them, Robert Barry and Richard Macneil bring three each, and Blanchouse arrives with three, the first we have listed from them. The last two come from the Zoological Society of London's plate archive rather than a new commission.
Sizes run 250, 500 and 1000 pieces, and six of the boxes use the large-piece formats: five Big 500s and one Big 250. Release is expected 3 Aug – 30 Sept 2026. That is the manufacturer's estimate rather than a date we can promise, and you can read how pre-ordering works at the end of this post.
All of them sit together in the House of Puzzles collection.
Blanchouse, and a look House of Puzzles has not done before
House of Puzzles built its name on detailed British scenes: thatched cottages, market squares, watercolour animals. Blanchouse is not that. Three titles in hard-edged blocks of saturated colour and deep shadow, closer to a screen print than a painting, and all three portrait rather than landscape, which on a puzzle board you notice before you have opened the bag. Each box names the place on the front: Miami, Majorca.
Untold Stories is a library stacked storey on storey to the top of the frame: arched windows glowing amber, iron balconies between the levels, spiral stairs climbing out of sight, and shelf after shelf of spines filling everything in between.
Almost no landmarks and thousands of book spines in the same few tones — the hardest solve in this batch.
Miami Living is a double-height garden room in pink and magenta, tall arched windows running floor to ceiling with greenery pressed against the glass. Majorcan Life is the calmer of the pair: a shaded courtyard, a stone fountain on tiled floor, Moorish arches at the back and an orange tree over the wall. The arches and the fountain go in first; the dappled paving is nearly all shades of the same blue.
Two from the ZSL archive
House of Puzzles drew these two from the Zoological Society of London's historic plates rather than new artwork, and they are the most demanding boxes in the range. Wonderful Wildlife threads tigers, ring-tailed lemurs, a black panther, spider monkeys and blue-and-gold macaws through hollyhocks, hibiscus and monarch butterflies on pale blue. The animals repeat across the whole sheet, so you sort by the flowers and the flat background instead of by subject.
Brilliant Birds does the same with broadbills, leafbirds and finches packed wing to wing on soft green: rose-pink breasts, black-and-yellow barring, kingfisher blues, every bird on the same slim red-stemmed branches. Both are the sort of thing that goes on a wall afterwards rather than back in the box.
Two more for the numbered series
House of Puzzles runs two numbered series, and this season adds one to each.
No.30 – Winter Break is the thirtieth Find the Difference puzzle, with fifteen changes hidden in the picture. A snowbound village gathers round The Old Bull: a couple walking a labrador over the stone bridge, a red van by the phone box, a pheasant along the bank, a robin on the holly. You get two goes at it. Build the picture, then hunt the differences. The snow over everything makes the sorting slower than a thousand pieces suggests.
No. 22 – Toymaker's Workshop is number twenty-two in Tracy Hall's Collectors Edition series and includes shaped pieces. A toymaker paints a wooden cat at his bench while model aeroplanes and a paper dove hang from the rafters, with a nutcracker, a dapple-grey rocking horse, rag dolls and a lit tree behind him. Hundreds of small painted toys and almost nothing repeated, so you sort by object rather than by colour. It comes in 1000 and 500 pieces.
Christmas, if you like to be ready
Four Christmas designs, six boxes. Tracy Hall's Christmas Market sets fairy-light colour against winter dusk, and Keith Stapleton's Away in a Manger puts the nativity under a thatched roof lit by a single hanging lantern, with the magi riding down the hillside beneath the star and Bethlehem lit blue in the distance. The lantern-lit stable holds nearly all the colour, so the night sky is the long stretch.
Robert Barry's Last Minute Rush handles the other side of December: snow, lamplight and pillar-box red. If you are stocking up early, the rest of the season sits in Christmas puzzles.
Five Big 500s and a Big 250
The Big formats use larger pieces on the same 69 x 48cm finished size, which makes them easier on tired eyes and easier to handle without dropping half a row. Tracy Hall has three of them here. A Clowder of Cats is fifteen cats named by breed in copperplate script: a tortoiseshell on the windowsill, a black cat over an embroidery frame, a white cat curled up in the fruit bowl among the grapes. Every one sits on open pale background, so the fur markings do the work and the empty space is the challenge.
Night Owls and Nanny, Billy & the Kids fill out her three, Keith Stapleton's Arctic Convoy has crew chipping ice off the rails of an escort ship on the Murmansk run, and Away in a Manger also comes as a Big 250 for a shorter sitting. More of the format is in large piece jigsaw puzzles.
Ponies, harbours and Trafalgar Square
The rest of the range is the House of Puzzles you already know: British scenes, painted straight. Richard Macneil brings three. Twilight in Trafalgar Square catches the square in the wet at dusk, one of Landseer's lions above the crowd, two red buses and a black cab on the road, Big Ben and the London Eye against an apricot sky and the pavement throwing all of it back in streaks. The buses and the lamp posts are quick wins; the reflected light on the wet road is where the hours go.
His other two are quieter: Waiting by the Wharf and Passing Through, both 500 pieces. Keith Stapleton has New Forest Ponies at the ford, a bay mare standing in the shallows with her foal and a lad watching from the bridge with his bike propped beside him, plus Abbotsford House in summer planting and Finding Fern under terracotta and fern green. Robert Barry's Legends of the Skies is the aircraft one, chalk white and sea blue against military green.
How pre-ordering works
A pre-order reserves your copy, but it is not a guarantee. Release dates are the manufacturer's estimate and can move, which is why we give a window rather than a day. In the rare event we cannot get an item at all, we email you straight away and refund it in full. You are never left waiting on something that is not coming.
Everything open sits in pre-orders, and the full House of Puzzles range, current and upcoming, is in the House of Puzzles collection.
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