Jigsaw Puzzle Games

A jigsaw is the oldest idea in this catalogue and the one that has changed least in the move to a screen. You still start with an edge, still sort by colour before you sort by shape, and still spend the last three pieces wondering how they were the hard ones.

What the screen does add is the piece count. Most of the games here let you split the same image into anything from a dozen pieces to a couple of hundred, which means the same picture is a two-minute distraction or a half-hour sit-down depending on what you pick at the start. That single setting matters more than the artwork does, and it is worth changing before you decide a game is too easy or too fiddly.

The images divide roughly into three groups. There are photographic collections — animals, landscapes, architecture, food — where the difficulty comes from large areas of similar colour. There are illustrated and cartoon sets, which are easier because every region has a hard outline. And there are seasonal boards built around a holiday, which tend to be short and are best treated as one sitting rather than a collection.

A few of the games let you bring your own image. Those are worth knowing about even if you never use the feature, because a photograph you have looked at a thousand times is a genuinely different exercise from a stock landscape you have never seen.

Questions about this section

Can I choose how many pieces a picture is cut into?

In most of these games, yes. The count is usually set before the picture starts and it changes the length of a round far more than the image itself does.

Do jigsaw games here save an unfinished picture?

Some keep progress in your browser on the same device, but none of them carry it across devices — there is no account on this site to carry it with.