Animated Puzzles Star

I had posted this originally under the daily challenge medal achievement as was asked about copying this over by QuickMythril. I figure it's worthwhile to have these ideas posted here for reference as well.

In general, you need to complete every challenge in a single month for the Diamond Medal. Whether or not you change the date or play every challenge as it comes around is up to you. No judging by me there.

I want to describe the puzzle types and how to approach them. A lot of it feels unfair or impossible at times and can easily lead to frustration. Here is what I've found and the best ideas I have.

There a 4 puzzle types in the Daily Challenges. You can separate them based on the puzzle picture:

1) Border - You are given a blank puzzle and all the border pieces. You need to place a bunch of them onto the board. It appears you need to complete half the border (one long and one short edge).

2) Checkers - Half the pieces are on the board in a checker pattern. You are given a single piece at a time to fill into the puzzle. It might be around 10 pieces to place to complete.

3) Full Puzzle - You are given all the pieces and need to begin to build the puzzle from scratch. This also appears to be about 10 pieces to complete the challenge.

4) 5 Puzzle Piece Combo - You are given one piece on the board and have to place pieces that attach to the current block. You are given one piece at a time.

In terms of the puzzle types, I feel the difficulty going from easiest to hardest is:
Easiest - 5 Puzzle Piece
Border
Checker
Hardest - Full Puzzle

Additionally, there are 3 banner colors to indicate the difficulty:
Red - Hard
Yellow - Medium
Green - Easy

The color of the puzzle just means that the puzzle is more subdivided and you need to place more pieces correctly in order to pass. You are given 5 "lives" with 25 seconds to place a piece. Here are the general and specific strategies I've found so far.

General
- Use the eye button in the bottom right corner. This pauses the clock and gives you time to analyze the piece you're going to place. This might not help in some of the puzzles with the large open sky, but a lot of times you might be able to find the exact spot of the piece you are given.
- The pieces are already oriented the correct direction. You don't have to rotate them at all.
- For the single piece at a time puzzles, you are not given the same pieces every time. You could easily get better piece selection to make your next try easier. I've purposely failed a few times just to come back to a much more advantageous set.
- Consider not placing a known piece immediately. Fully use your 25 seconds to plan out your next move or two. I know I already mentioned the corners, but these give you about 1.5 minutes of time to look at other pieces and figure out what to do next.
- As mentioned by QuickMythril, a lot of the puzzles actual have some simple animations occurring in them. If you follow the movements, you might be able to find the right spot for puzzles that look so similar across it.
- Additionally by QuickMythril, it was mentioned to try all the puzzles as part of the campaign before attempting this. It's a decent idea since it gives you time to get used to each of the puzzles and learn some of the layouts.

Puzzle Specific
- Border: The corner pieces are your best friend. They are obvious so you could place a corner right before the time runs out while trying to figure out the next piece to continue building you border.
- Checkers: The discoloration of the placed pieces can make matching a real pain. I can't stress trying to get a good starting piece or two to open up the board to you.
- 5 Puzzle Piece: Just focus on the area you have already and where the new one appears to fit. Focus on the full picture as much as you need to simplify things.
- Full Puzzle: Work from the edges. Aim for the feature-full areas that start in a corner. Since there are a lot of pieces to look at, consider dragging the panel out wider where the pieces are stored. Scrolling through the set takes a lot of extra time.

Lucky Guessing: For the full puzzle challenges, I have tried to place a really easy area by guessing the location. While you could go all out measuring, if you have decent spacial reasoning, you can place the piece in a couple guesses. Sometimes this can make those full puzzles and have a real easy time the rest of the way.

I can confirm that you can set your date to the last day of a month and be able to go back and do all of the puzzles from the whole month (you need to do every single one of them to get a Diamond medal).

One thing to note though, when I restarted my game later after changing the data back to normal it was telling me it couldn't load the saved game from Live and it was probably because the mis-matched date because after I changed it forward again it loaded just fine. Just a forewarning, as it did disable my achievements (maybe because it went offline?) until I changed the data forward.