North Rhine Westphalia Puzzle

Intent:

I created a small puzzle to engage the citizens of Düsseldorf by challenging them to see how well they know their state in preparation for the upcoming state elections.

Usage:

There are 2 difficulty levels:

the 11 piece puzzle to align roughly with cultural/historical regions
the 2.5mm holes can be used to add flags and assign the 53 municipalities (Kreise & Kreisfreie Städte)

Maker tips:

To make the borders and rivers a different colour, I simply paused the print after the appropriate level using post processing in Cura and switched the filament before continuing.

I made the flags by cutting the ends off of standard toothpicks, printing the flags on paper, cutting them out and using gluestick to fasten them. I uploaded the PDF

Printing on an Ender 3 V3 SE, all pieces took a little over 24 hours to print with 20% infill.
No Supports needed.

Disclaimers:

Following liberties were taken for the purpose of improving the puzzling experience:

In comparison to my previous puzzles i left gaps between the borders allowing the pieces to slide together without issues.
The regions were selected based on feeling. As the regionality rarely cleanly follows municipality borders, I did not intend to offend anyone by assigning their municipality to the wrong region.

The political map the puzzle is based on was accurate in March 2026.