Most puzzle advice is encouragement. This page is not: it is the set of techniques that actually change how a board goes, sorted by the kind of puzzle you are looking at. Everything here applies to the games on this site and to the same formats anywhere else.
Block boards: play the space, not the piece
A block board hands you three shapes and a grid. The beginner’s instinct is to find where each shape fits; the habit that separates a long game from a short one is looking at the empty space instead and asking what shape it can still accept.
Two rules follow from that. Keep one full row or column reachable at all times, because the long straight piece is what ends most games and it needs a clear run. And place the largest of the three shapes first — small pieces will find a home almost anywhere, so spending the awkward one while you still have room is always cheaper than saving it.
Jigsaws: sort before you place
Edge pieces first is standard advice and it is correct, but the more useful step is the one after it. Sort the interior by dominant colour before placing anything, and on a photograph sort by texture rather than hue — mane, grass and stonework are similar in colour and completely different in pattern.
Piece count matters more than the picture. The same image at forty pieces and at two hundred are different activities, and choosing the count is the single decision that determines whether a board is a distraction or an evening.
Sliding frames: solve in bands and never look back
A fifteen-tile frame is solved in bands, not all at once. Complete the top row, then the left column, then treat what remains as a smaller frame and repeat. The discipline is refusing to disturb a finished band to fix a single tile — if a tile is wrong, the answer is in the smaller square, not in the part you already solved.
The last three tiles are a special case and cannot be placed one at a time. They have to be cycled into position together, which is why a frame that is nearly finished can suddenly feel impossible.
Sorting boards: the free slot is the game
Every sorting board — tubes, bolts, birds on wires — is a constraint problem about space rather than colour. The number of empty slots is what makes a level easy or hard, and filling your last free slot with the wrong colour is how almost every failed board fails.
Two habits fix most of it. Complete whichever colour is closest to finished, because a completed colour frees a whole slot. And never make a move that does not either finish something or open something — idle shuffling always costs space and never returns it.
Memory grids: name what you turn
Recall for pictures is weak and recall for words is strong, so the single most effective habit in a memory board is to name each card silently as you turn it. «Red tractor» is one item in memory; a mental image of a red tractor is not.
Split the grid into quarters and work one at a time. It sounds like tidiness and it is actually a real memory aid — position is easier to hold relative to a small region than to a whole board.
Merging boards: pick a corner and defend it
On a sliding merge grid, choose a corner, keep your largest tile in it, and never swipe in the direction that would move it. Build a descending row along that edge so your big tile always has a partner waiting.
On a falling merge board the equivalent discipline is keeping one column deliberately low. It is where the piece that matches nothing goes, and without it a single odd number ends an otherwise healthy run.
What applies to all of them
Restart earlier than feels reasonable. Nearly every format here has arrangements that become unsolvable several moves before that becomes visible, and time spent recovering a dead board is time not spent on a live one.
And read the board before the first move rather than during it. In every genre on this site the opening decision constrains more than any later one, and it is the only move you can make with complete information.
Two of these formats now have full walkthroughs of their own: logic grids and the X-and-dot method, and the jigsaw method from frame to sky.