First of all kudos to the designers for creating a novel way to approach jigsaw puzzles. After ordering a 3-puzzle set (because who can pass up a discount?) we finally dug into Astro Gastro.
The setup is neat. I read the instructions aloud to the family and we started sorting through pieces, but immediately ran into two problems with them:
1) On seven of the pieces, the image layers (front sides) had become uncoupled from their backing (back sides). (Or perhaps were never joined to begin with; I didn't see any dry glue anywhere.) I solved this with some Elmer's glue, but it took a while to find the matches.
2) In one corner of the board, it looks like the cardboard layers for the backing had gotten wrinkled during the press, which meant that they never quite joined flush. At first I thought this was water damage, but examining the back sides shows the wrinkles pretty clearly. This issue led to the lower right corner of the puzzle getting pretty messy. This would have been a worse problem if it wasn't confined to the edge pieces.
Overall though, we're having fun, just hoping the designers can solve these manufacturing hiccups.