Free Games How to play Jigsaw Puzzle
- Click the Start button to begin.
- The empty grid sits at the top and the pieces are scattered in a strip along the bottom.
- Drag each piece by clicking and holding, then release it over the correct spot to lock it in place.
- The puzzle is twelve pieces, four across and three down, cut from a single photograph of two bears in a wood.
- The pieces are plain squares. There are no tabs and no notches, so shape tells you nothing at all — the picture is your only clue.
- They start stacked in a strip along the bottom of the board, overlapping each other. Drag the top one away and the next is underneath.
- Hold the mouse button down on a piece, move onto the grid, and let go. Once the pointer is over the grid the piece snaps to whichever outlined square the pointer is in.
- The Start button only clears the instructions card. Nothing is timed before or after it.
- When all twelve squares hold the right piece, a green panel appears with a button that reshuffles the same picture.
Tips that actually help
- Forget everything a cardboard jigsaw taught you about edges. On a boxed puzzle the flat sides tell you which pieces belong on the border, and that is why everyone starts there. Here every piece has four flat sides, so that shortcut is gone and you have to sort by what is printed on the piece instead.
- Split the pieces into three bands before you place anything. The photograph divides into three rows of four, and the rows do not look alike. The top row is dark trunks and backlit green leaves. The middle row holds the two bears. The bottom row is pale grey rock and brown earth. Deciding which band a piece belongs to cuts your choice from twelve down to four.
- Judge overall brightness before you look at detail. The top band is much darker than the bottom band, and pale grey rock appears almost nowhere except along the bottom. Holding a piece a little further away makes that easier to see than staring at it closely.
- Follow the tree trunks. Two heavy vertical trunks run down the picture, one near the middle and one on the right. Any piece carrying a straight vertical stripe of bark has to sit in the same column as the rest of that trunk, and a line that runs across a join is the strongest clue in the whole puzzle.
- Place the two bears’ heads first. They are the most distinctive pieces on the board and they pin the middle row down. Once they are in, the pieces on either side of them have to continue the same fur, which settles the rest of that row quickly.
- Drop into an empty square, not onto a full one. Pieces stack: if you drop a second piece onto a square that already holds one, the newer piece covers the older and the one underneath disappears from view until you drag the top one away again.
- There is no penalty for a wrong guess. Nothing is counted and nothing is scored, so if you think a piece belongs in a square, put it there and look at whether the lines match. Being wrong costs you one drag.
Playing Jigsaw Puzzle comfortably
This puzzle asks for a mouse or a trackpad, and it will not accept anything else. The code listens for mouse presses and mouse movement only — there are no touch handlers at all — so on a phone or a tablet the pieces will not move, however carefully you press them. On a computer, you have to hold the button down for the whole of each movement, which is exactly the thing that is hard with a tremor, a stiff hand or a small trackpad. We would rather tell you that than have you fight the board. If dragging is the problem, Solitaire and Pyramid here move cards with single clicks, and Memory and Word Search need no dragging either.
There is no keyboard control of any kind, and no way to reach the pieces with the Tab key. The piece you are holding is outlined in red while you hold it, which is the only feedback the board gives you. The empty squares are drawn as light grey outlines on a light grey background, which is a low-contrast combination; they become much easier to make out once two or three pieces are down and give the grid some shape.
Nothing here is timed, counted or scored, and nothing is saved. There is one photograph and one size of puzzle, so it looks the same every time you come back, and if you reload the page or close the tab the pieces scatter and you begin again. That also means there is no way to pause and return to a part-finished puzzle. Nothing pops up over the board while you are playing.
If something is not working
Nothing happens when I touch the pieces on my tablet.
The game only listens for a mouse, so taps and finger drags do nothing at all. It needs a computer with a mouse or a trackpad. This is a limitation of the puzzle itself and not something a setting can change.
The pieces along the bottom are cut off.
The strip the pieces are kept in is shorter than a piece is tall, so the lower part of each one runs past the edge of the board and cannot be seen. Grab whatever part you can see and the whole piece still moves normally.
A piece has vanished.
It is almost certainly buried. Two pieces can sit in the same square, and the newer one hides the older completely. Drag the top piece out of that square and the missing one will be underneath. The same thing happens down in the strip, where the pieces overlap from the start.
The piece jumped to the wrong square.
While the pointer is over the grid, the piece snaps to whichever square the pointer is in, not to the square the picture appears to be over. Watch the pointer rather than the piece, and move the pointer into the square you actually want before letting go.
The picture looks finished but no panel has appeared.
Two things can cause that. The puzzle is only checked when you let go of a piece with the pointer inside the grid, so drop the last piece onto the grid rather than releasing it outside. And every one of the twelve squares must hold its own piece — if two are stacked in one square, some other square is empty behind them.
How do I start the puzzle again from the beginning?
Reload the page. There is no restart button until you have finished, because the Play Again button lives inside the panel that only appears when the puzzle is complete.
Where Jigsaw Puzzle came from
The first jigsaw puzzles were made around 1760 by John Spilsbury, a London map maker. He glued printed maps of the world onto sheets of hardwood and cut along the national boundaries so that pupils could put the countries back together. They were called dissections, and they were teaching apparatus rather than toys. The earliest wooden ones were often not interlocking, which made them considerably harder than a modern puzzle: with nothing to hold a piece in place, you could not test a piece by feel, only by looking at it.
Cardboard puzzles appeared in the late 1800s but were slow to take over, because makers feared card would be taken for a cheap substitute for wood. Puzzles became a craze among adults in the United States between 1907 and 1910, and in Europe a year or two later, and cardboard only became the usual material after the Second World War, when it could be cut well enough. The puzzle on this page has more in common with the eighteenth-century kind than the modern one: the pieces are plain squares that do not lock together, so the picture is genuinely all you have to work with.
Common questions
Can I undo a misplaced piece?
Yes, simply drag the piece from its current location to the correct spot. There's no penalty for moving pieces around.
How long does a puzzle take to complete?
Most players finish in 5-15 minutes, but you can take as long as you'd like. There's no timer or pressure.
How many pieces is it?
Twelve — four across and three down. Each is cut as a plain square from one photograph, and every piece is the same size and shape as every other.
Can I choose a different picture or a larger puzzle?
No. There is one photograph and one grid, and there are no difficulty settings. For a longer sit-down puzzle, <a href="/games/mahjong/">Mahjong</a> and <a href="/games/nonogram/">Nonogram</a> on this site take rather more working out.
Does it work on a phone or a tablet?
No. The pieces respond to a mouse only, so a touchscreen will not move them. You need a computer with a mouse or a trackpad.
Is my progress kept if I close the page?
No. Nothing is stored anywhere. Reloading or returning later gives you the same picture with the pieces scattered afresh, so it is best finished in one sitting.
Why do the pieces not lock together like a real jigsaw?
Because they are square tiles cut on a straight grid rather than shaped pieces cut with tabs and notches. It makes the puzzle harder than the piece count suggests, since you cannot rule a piece out by its shape.
About this version
This is a self-hosted, open-source version of Jigsaw Puzzle (source), used under its MIT licence and hosted here so it loads fast and shows no third-party adverts inside the game. Browse all of our free games.
