Jigsaw Puzzle Tips: Find the Right Piece Faster, Measured
How to do a jigsaw puzzle faster: build the frame first, sort pieces into color piles and read the tabs. We counted how much each habit saves.
Sunroom Games · Updated
The slow part of a jigsaw puzzle isn't fitting pieces together. It's finding the next one: looking through the loose pieces, again and again, for the one that goes in the gap you're working on. So we counted how much looking each common habit saves, on all 27 pictures in our jigsaw puzzles.
What we counted
We can't watch you puzzle, so we counted something we can check: how many loose pieces you'd look through, on average, to find each piece you need. Our counting player works on one gap at a time, always next to pieces already in place, and looks through the loose pieces in no particular order until the right one turns up. Then we changed one habit at a time:
| How the pieces were searched | 48 pieces | 150 pieces |
|---|---|---|
| No plan: row by row, looking through every loose piece | 12.8 | 38.2 |
| Frame first, with the edge pieces kept apart | 6.8 | 22.3 |
| Color piles, looking through the right color first | 6.6 | 17.3 |
| Frame first and color piles together | 3.8 | 10.5 |
The numbers are pieces looked at for each piece found, averaged over all 27 pictures. Together, the two habits cut the looking to under a third, on small puzzles and big ones alike.
To make the color piles the way a person would, we named the color of every little patch of each picture with a plain word (blue, green, beige, gray and so on) and put each piece on the pile of its most common color. These are counts from a simple model, not stopwatch timings of real people, but every choice in it is one people make at the table.
1. Build the frame first
Edge pieces have a straight side, so they're easy to pick out, and there are fewer of them than you might think. Doing the frame first, with the edge pieces kept in a pile of their own, nearly halved the looking on a 48-piece puzzle (from 12.8 pieces to 6.8 for each one found) and cut it by about 40% on a 150-piece puzzle (from 38.2 to 22.3).
The frame matters more on small puzzles, because edge pieces are a bigger share of them. In a 48-piece puzzle, 24 pieces (half) are edge pieces; in a 150-piece puzzle, 46 are (about a third). Either way, finishing the frame first also shows you exactly how big the picture is, and gives every other piece something to join on to.
2. Sort the pieces into color piles
Sorting by color helped about as much as the frame on a 48-piece puzzle (6.6 pieces looked at instead of 12.8), and more than the frame on a 150-piece one (17.3 instead of 38.2). The bigger the puzzle, the more it pays: our pictures made about four color piles at 48 pieces and between five and six at 150.
You don't need many piles. Sky, water, grass, flowers, buildings: a handful of piles that you could name out loud is plenty. On a screen, drag the pieces of one color to one part of the table, the way you'd push them into heaps at home.
3. Some pictures are harder than others
How much color sorting helps depends on the picture. A picture with many different colors breaks into small piles; a picture that's mostly one color leaves you with one big pile, and you're back to looking through nearly everything. With both habits, on 48 pieces, the easiest of our pictures for color were:
- Les Andelys, Côte d'Aval by Paul Signac: six piles, none more than a third of the pieces, and 2.3 pieces looked at for each one found.
- Stacks of Wheat (Sunset, Snow Effect) by Claude Monet: 2.4, with its blues, purples and oranges.
- The Bedroom by Vincent van Gogh: 2.4, with blue walls, a yellow bed and a green window.
The hardest were the quiet, mostly gray pictures, where 45 or 46 of the 48 pieces landed on one pile:
- Rabbit Warren at Pontoise, Snow by Camille Pissarro: 6.3.
- The Place du Havre, Paris by Camille Pissarro: 6.3.
- The Beach at Sainte-Adresse by Claude Monet: 6.1.
For a relaxing first puzzle, pick a colorful picture. For a challenge, pick a quiet one, or one of the snow scenes.
4. Read the tabs and blanks
Every piece inside the frame has four sides, and each side either has a tab sticking out or a blank going in. In our puzzles each cut is a tab on one side and a blank on the other, chosen at random, so across all of our cuts (5,346 inside pieces) the shapes came out like this:
- Two tabs and two blanks: 38% of pieces, the most common shape.
- One tab or three tabs: about a quarter each.
- All four tabs, or no tabs at all: about 6% each, so they're easy to spot and worth remembering.
Shape is the quickest check of all. When a gap already has pieces in place above it and to its left, only 27% of the inside pieces (about one in four) have the right tab or blank on both of those sides. A glance at the shape rules out three pieces in four before you even look at the colors.
5. Let the picture help you
On our site, the picture shows faintly on the board, the way you'd prop up the box lid, and a piece snaps into place when you drop it near its spot. When you're stuck, the Hint button lights up a piece and outlines its place, in the same order this guide suggests: a corner first, then the rest of the frame, then pieces next to the picture so far. Turn the faint picture off in Settings when you'd like more of a challenge.
Which size to choose
Start with 24 or 48 pieces to get a feel for it. On a phone, 12 or 24 pieces are easiest to handle; on a tablet or computer, 48 or 96 make a relaxing puzzle, and 150 is a proper project. Whatever the size, frame first and color piles will save you most of the looking.
If you like matching games, try our Mahjong solitaire tips next.