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Earth 540 pc puzzle ball from Ravensburger
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Minimum Age: 10 years
Rating: 
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Our Editorial Review
Product Description Get to know the Earth's rich geography as you piece together this detailed 3-D globe.- Expertly crafted puzzle pieces fit perfectly together
- Forms a solid, smooth 3-D globe
- No glue required
- 504 pieces
- Includes two stands – a plastic base stand and a metal rotation stand
- Finished puzzle size is 8.5" in diameter
- Each piece is individually numbered on the back for convenience
- By Ravensburger
Piece together your very own planet Earth – and take a 3-D lesson in geography the fun way!
Customer Reviews
Great toy for my 6 year old son! Posted 29 November 2008
My 6 year old son had been wanting this puzzle ball for about a year, ever since Aug 2007. We finally got it for him on 23 Nov 2008. At first he was a little overwhemled, but each puzzle piece is numbered 1-540. So I put the puzzle pieces in piles of 100's so he could do it a 100 pieces at a time. He spent about an hour a day on it. It took him about 5 days and 5 hours total to do it, with very little help from me. He also likes it for looking at all of the countries and states.
Thanks again for such a great toy!
It's a great puzzle! Posted 26 November 2008
It's a lot of fun to put together and definitely teaches geography. It's challenging too, especially in expanses of open ocean but fortunately all the pieces are numbered. It's only drawback is that it's not really a "group" puzzle. Because of it's design you basically start in Antarctica and work your way to the North Pole, pretty much holding it in your hand as you go. Because of the curve of the pieces it's difficult to put together large "sub-assemblies" of areas like you might with a traditional flat puzzle. Nor could one person (or group) start with the South Pole and the other person start with the North Pole, meeting at the Equator. It's also a little fragile. It won't fall apart in normal use but will not stand up to impact or rough handling.
All in all it's a challenging puzzle, looks great completed, and I would highly recommend it! Suitable for kids 7 and up with adult supervision and kids 10 and up alone.
Innovative and fun Posted 02 November 2008
I was thinking about getting a globe as a gift for school age children and came across this puzzle globe. It is a current, working globe with the added bonus of being able to visualize each country as it is put together. The puzzle format is easy to use (the pieces are numbered on the back), but still a little challenging. It is also hard and durable, and can withstand pressure and falling (not a hard fall, I don't think). It would be nice to have some sort of back lighting for night use, but craft aficionados will find a way to remedy that. After I gave one away as a gift, I recommended it to a friend of mine as a gift for an 8 year old puzzle lover. It was his favorite gift ever and he finished it before the night was over!
Old Guy's toy  Posted 27 August 2008
We love maps and globes. Our family room is full of them. This is just the latest addition to the decor. It was fun to put together. I'm not sure how kid friendly it is but it is really old guy friendly.
great puzzle Posted 21 August 2008
I'm not a big fan of jigsaw puzzles (sure, they are fun, but I can think of more fun things to do with my time), but when I saw this thing in its assembled form at barnes and noble, something about it made me do a double take. It just looked so cool and unusual -- a professional-looking globe made out of jigsaw pieces with no internal support! How can it be so smooth? How can it stay solid? I hadn't even noticed that it wasn't a solid globe at first, when casually catching it out of the corner of my eye a few times as I was browsing the book stalls. It seemed like a lot of fun to make something like this, as was the prospect of testing my geography. My wife didn't see it as all *that* cool, but we still had a blast assembling this thing, though she only did the US, canada, and antarctica and only had patience for 30-60 minutes at a time. Trying to figure out which part of the world a given piece belonged to based only on parts of city names was a lot of fun. Watching it grow was great. Highly addictive, causes sleep loss. Took 3 days, maybe 4 hours a day. I would say the difficulty level is appropriate for adults and kids over ~12, or under 12 if accompanied by adults (unless it's assembled in cheat-mode where you look at the numbers on the backs of pieces). The pieces are hard and plastic, and interlock pretty tightly. It holds together pretty well during assembly, and is sturdy when fully assembled -- you can roll it around like a soccer ball (just don't kick it) and it can spin in the base very fast without breaking. It didn't seem quite as smooth as in the store -- some pieces jotted out by a fraction of a mm, but it does look perfectly smooth from a distance. My only qualm is that the printing on some adjacent pieces was slightly misaligned (< 1mm) and that some ocean pieces are completely identical, so that the only way to distinguish them is by the numbers in the back. But it's actually perfectly useable as a regular, fairly detailed globe and especially as a cool decoration! I'll probably eventually get some of their other ones, such as the globe of the night sky.
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