[ConsiderCrying]

The middle part is a bit too heady for me but I'm fascinated by this sentence in the conclusion: "I assume that you wouldn’t actually see a 999-piece puzzle because the lawyers would claim calling that 1000 was false advertising."

My soul wants to hope that nobody would be as crazy as to sue a puzzle company for having 999 pieces instead of an even 1000 but my mind is saying "duh, of course they would".

Wonder what the situation is like for those new types of puzzles that are circular or have irregular shapes. Those are probably easier to make into an even, pretty number but I feel like there would still be exceptions.

[wjnc]

Call me strange but I've actually counted the pieces to a few of my kids puzzles and the 100 and 200 piece puzzles never have exactly that number. And it wasn't off-by-one either. I always figured it make sense that the box advertises an 'around'-number as an indication of difficulty. (For the Why?: When puzzling together the key is to not overdo with the helping, so there is some time at hand for other brain activities.)

[foobarian]

I wasted a lot of time as a kid looking for missing pieces (and recounting them several times to begin with) in a 2000 puzzle that didn't have that many pieces. I wish they had an exact number in the fine print.

[skipnup]

The last puzzle I solved actually had a small table with the advertised and actual number of pieces.

[mvn9]

Just cut one piece in half. It's a puzzle.

[w-m]

It implies that more puzzle pieces is better, so somebody might sue if they were to get fewer pieces than indicated on the box.

But how about suing because you get more pieces than advertised? Having more pieces than what's written on the box makes it harder to do the puzzle, causing stress, anxiety and lost time!

Take them greedy puzzle companies to court, left and right!