There are of course oodles of new images for the traditional jigsaw puzzle lines. But, there are a few unique new offerings, as well.

I don’t know much about Sepia colours, and the little I do know has nothing to do with what’s happening in Ji Ga Zo, so the idea that you could make an unlimited number of different images from the exact same 300 shaded pieces is a little mind-blowing for me. I came home with a Ji Ga Zo sample, and I still can’t figure how it works.  I thought maybe there’d be a pack of one shade, and another pack of another shade, etc. Instead, it looks like each of the 300 pieces is unique. So how is it that each picture uses exactly 300 different shade – and doesn’t need at least one duplicate? What about pictures that have more light tones than dark tones?  However it works, there were certainly enough examples at Toy Fair to demonstrate the effect.

You start building a Cityscape 4D Puzzle by assembling the land base using traditional interlocking jigsaw pieces - that's what the original terrain looked like before there were any buildings. The next step is placing the 3D buildings to build the city. The twist is that you do this according to WHEN the actual buildings were built. What's totally cool about these puzzles is that you get a visual of what the skyline looked like as it evolved over time - thus, the 4th dimension: time. No wonder the manufacturer claims it's educational! Launched last October (2010) with the New York version, there are already quite a few different city puzzles in the line - including Toronto.

Building a puzzle blind (i.e. with no image to follow) is a challenge – one you’ll face making a WASGIJ? Puzzle because you’re not making the picture you see on the box. Instead, you’ll make the same scene from the vantage point of one of the characters in the picture. The idea is to find out what’s causing the commotion. A fun little twist on classic puzzle-making, and available in a number of different subject themes.

Based on the K-Dron shape, K-Dron Universe - a transformable world/constellation map – is a very intriguing little device that inverts the globe so that it’s more like the inside surface of a bowl than the outside of a ball.  What we like about it is that because there’s empty space instead of a solid globe, you can get a better 3D reference than a traditional globe because you can see the whole hemisphere at the same time.

Highly popular in the 1960s, the Instant Insanity puzzle is back – and it has a new cousin. The manufacturer’s description for the new one-piece, twisty-turny Instant Insanity II suggests that it has the same appeal and game-play as the original. But in the few minutes of playtime I had in New York, it felt more like a Rubik’s cube than the 4 cube puzzle I remember. 

And finally, good news! The classic version Triazzle - which challenges puzzlers to match all three sides of each piece – is also back. And there’s a new simplified version for 2011: Triazzle Kids requires only a single, one-sided match to either the frame, or one other piece, making it suitable for the youngest of puzzlers (2+).

There are far too many other new puzzles to highlight here, but we are profiling them, so be sure to check them out.