[ehsankia]

Maybe just my biased brain, but the title made it sound like they were half a million under, not over. In some way, this is how 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles will never be exactly 1000 pieces. As long as there's at least 1000, I think most people are fine, especially as an art piece. And of course as mentioned, there's the possibility that there's filler inside.

It would've been much worse if it was under though.

[jefftk]

The ones that are 25 pieces x 40 pieces are really 1000 pieces. But some puzzles are 27x38 or other more square form factors.

[Retric]

25x40 is rarely used because non square piece give a lot more info about placement and a 25 X 40 rectangle is almost twice as wide as it is tall. It’s rarely the right kind of aspect ratio.

[megablast]

> In some way, this is how 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles will never be exactly 1000 pieces.

What??

[delecti]

Yeah, most jigsaw puzzles do not have precisely the number of pieces advertised. Here's an amusing video (by the channel Stand-up Maths) that does a deep dive into it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXWvptwoCl8

TLDR if you don't have a half-hour: puzzles are usually cut with the pieces on grids, and not all aspect ratios are conducive to that with all piece counts. Like, you might want a 2:3 shaped puzzle with 500 pieces, and 18x28=504 is close enough.