How to Do a Jigsaw Puzzle: Tips for Beginners

8 min read

A jigsaw puzzle looks like it should be simple. Every piece fits in exactly one place, so in principle you could try each piece in each position until the picture appears. In practice nobody does that, because the arithmetic is brutal: a 500-piece puzzle has around a quarter of a million piece-position pairs to consider. Solving a puzzle is not really about fitting pieces together. It is about steadily reducing the number of pieces you have to consider at all.

Everything below is a way of making that number smaller. If you take one idea away, make it this one: a good solver is not faster at trying pieces, they are better at never picking up the wrong piece in the first place.

Set up before you start

The single biggest difference between a frustrating puzzle and a pleasant one is whether you can see all your pieces. Pieces hidden under other pieces are pieces you will search for three times and find once.

Spread everything out face up in a single layer before you place anything. On a physical puzzle that means giving yourself a working area two to three times the size of the finished picture. Online it means zooming out far enough to see the whole board, then working zoomed in. It feels like a delay. It pays for itself within ten minutes.

Have the finished picture somewhere you can look at it. Not to copy it slavishly, but because you are going to be asking "where does a dark band with a thin pale line belong?" constantly, and answering that from memory is much harder than answering it by glancing at the box lid.

Sort before you solve

Sorting is the part beginners skip and experienced solvers spend the most time on. It feels unproductive because no pieces go into the picture while you do it, but sorting is precisely the activity that shrinks your search space.

The sorts worth doing, roughly in order of usefulness:

• Edges from middles. Edge pieces have at least one flat side and are easy to identify without thinking about the image at all. This split alone removes them from the pile you search when hunting for an interior piece.
• By dominant colour. Not by subtle shade — by the obvious "this is mostly sky" category. Six or seven piles is plenty. Twenty is a filing system you will spend more time maintaining than using.
• By distinctive feature. Anything unmistakable deserves its own small pile: lettering, a face, a wheel, a bright flower, a hard straight line running through the piece. These are the pieces that place themselves.

What you are building is an index. When you later need "the piece with the corner of the window frame", you want to search fifteen pieces, not five hundred.

Build the frame

Assembling the border first is the standard opening, and for a beginner it is the right one. It is the easiest part of the puzzle — flat sides are unambiguous — so it builds momentum, and finishing it tells you exactly how big the picture will be and where everything sits relative to the edges.

Work the corners first, then each side. Sort your edge pieces by colour as you go, because a border is usually several distinct runs: a stretch of sky, a stretch of grass, a stretch of shadow. You are matching within a run, not across the whole border.

Treat it as a convention, not a law. Some puzzles have a border that is one flat colour all the way round, and those are genuinely easier to finish last, once the interior tells you what order things go in.

Work in small, self-contained areas

After the frame, resist the urge to work on the whole picture at once. Pick one region with a clear identity — a building, a person, a patch of red flowers — and finish it as an island. Islands are satisfying, they are quick, and each one you complete is a large chunk of the picture whose remaining pieces are now defined by their neighbours rather than by guesswork.

Join your islands to the frame when they are big enough to be obvious. You are not obliged to grow the picture outward from one point; most puzzles come together as several separate patches that eventually meet.

Learn to read piece shape

Beginners match on picture. Experienced solvers match on picture and shape, and shape does a lot of the work when the image stops helping.

Most puzzles use a grid cut, so every piece has four edges, each of which is a tab sticking out or a blank going in. That gives a small number of shape families — pieces with two tabs opposite each other, pieces with three tabs and one blank, and so on. Once you start seeing those families, you can reject most of a pile at a glance without looking at the image at all.

This is the skill that makes hard puzzles possible. On a stretch of near-uniform sky, shape is often the only information available.

What to do when you are stuck

Being stuck almost always has the same cause: you are scanning the same pieces over and over without a plan, and your eye has stopped actually seeing them. Three things reliably break it.

Change the question. Instead of "where does this piece go?", ask "what piece goes here?" Pick a specific gap, work out what its neighbours demand — a tab on the left, a blank below, dark green shading to brown — and search for that description. Searching for a specification beats searching for a match.

Sort again. Take the pile you have been failing to use and re-sort it on a different property. Re-sorting forces you to look at every piece individually, which is exactly what your fixated eye has stopped doing.

Walk away. This is not folk wisdom. After long visual search your eye settles into a fixed pattern and you will reject the correct piece repeatedly without registering it. A few minutes away resets that, and it is common to place three pieces in the first minute after coming back.

Pick a puzzle you will finish

The most common beginner mistake is not technique, it is choosing a 1000-piece photograph of a lavender field as a first puzzle and concluding you are bad at jigsaws. You are not; you picked something hard.

Start around 100 pieces with an image that has plenty of distinct regions — several strong colours, recognisable objects, clear boundaries. A painting with a figure, a building and a sky is far friendlier than a uniform landscape at the same piece count. When that feels comfortable, roughly double the count rather than jumping straight to the largest size available.

Our guide to choosing the right piece count goes into what actually makes a puzzle hard, which is usually the image rather than the number.

A method, start to finish

1. Spread every piece face up where you can see it.
2. Split edges from interior pieces.
3. Sort interiors into six or seven colour groups, plus small piles for anything distinctive.
4. Build the border, working corner to corner in colour runs.
5. Complete two or three obvious islands.
6. Join islands to the frame and to each other.
7. For the difficult remainder, work gap-first and lean on piece shape.

That is the whole method. It is not complicated, and it will carry you from your first 100-piece puzzle to a 500-piece one without changing. The only thing that really changes with experience is how quickly you recognise which pile a piece belongs to — and that comes on its own.

Ready to try it? Browse the collection and pick something with plenty of distinct regions, or start with today's puzzle.

Common questions

Should I always start with the edges?

Starting with the edges is a good default for your first few puzzles. It gives you a finished frame early, which makes the scale of the puzzle concrete and gives every other piece a boundary to work toward. It is a convention rather than a rule, though, and experienced solvers often abandon it on puzzles where the border is a featureless block of colour.

How long should a jigsaw puzzle take?

For a first puzzle, expect roughly one to two minutes per piece. A 100-piece puzzle is typically half an hour to an hour, and a 500-piece puzzle is an evening or two. Pace varies enormously with the image: a photograph full of distinct objects can be several times quicker than an abstract pattern with the same piece count.

What should I do when I am completely stuck?

Stop searching and start sorting. Being stuck almost always means you are scanning the same pieces repeatedly without a plan. Pick one narrow visual feature, sort a batch of pieces by it, and work only within that batch. Looking away from the puzzle for a few minutes also genuinely helps, because it resets the visual fixation that makes you keep rejecting the right piece.