Down The Jigsaw Puzzle Rabbit Hole

Learning about the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships got me interested in jigsaw puzzles. I’ve been buying them, learning about them, and generally getting sucked into the quiet pleasure of solving them. Here’s some of the things I’ve discovered.

I started by checking out my local thrift stores. To my astonishment, it’s quite easy to find interesting puzzles that have never been opened before and to get them at bargain prices. The first one I found was especially intriguing to me because it was an Impossibles puzzle from 1994, “Great Wall of China.” (You can learn more about this long-running line of puzzles from this video.) Advertised as a “borderless puzzle with five extra pieces,” the front of the box doesn’t show the entire design. Borderless means the edge pieces look like pieces from the middle of the puzzle instead of having a tell-tale straight edge to help you out.

SPOILER ALERT: This post includes photos of the Great Wall of China puzzle (Bepuzzled Impossibles series). You have been warned.

I started this puzzle right away. I couldn’t help myself. I was curious what it would be like to tackle a truly challenging jigsaw puzzle. While it was hard, it wasn’t impossible, although this 755-piece puzzle took me almost 33 hours to solve.

Yes, I kept track. Having seen people race to put puzzles together, I was curious as to how long it might take me. I didn’t try to go fast, I just worked steadily. It took me 2.58 minutes per piece. My fastest time so far is for a 300-piece puzzle which took me 25.2 seconds per piece, so that gives you an idea how much harder it was. (Of course, that still isn’t truly fast. In the individual competitions, the puzzlers can solve a 500-piece puzzle in under an hour, which is a rate of 7.2 seconds per piece or less.)

One of the weird things I’ve learned is that not all puzzles have the number of pieces listed on the box. Stand-up Maths explains why in-depth in their 26-minute video “Why don’t Jigsaw Puzzles have the right number of pieces?” If you want to really understand this issue, watch it, but here’s the short answer for those who don’t have the time:

Cutting a 3:4 rectangle into a grid of puzzle pieces is more complicated than you think. You want your pieces to come out with reasonable shapes, squarish or not too far from square if possible, and some piece numbers like 200 don’t have good factors for this task. The 200-piece puzzle used as an example in the video actually has 204 pieces in it, because 12 x 17 isn’t too far from 3:4.

Now that I know this, I count the rows and columns after I finish a puzzle so I can calculate the actual number of pieces. So far, all my puzzles have had the number of pieces advertised.

Here are other things I’ve learned from my recent jigsaw puzzling:

Jigsaw puzzles are addictive. Every time you fit a piece into place, you get a little hit of dopamine. It’s difficult to walk away. Even with “Great Wall,” which was baffling at times, I just kept going and going and going.

Check the floor. There will be pieces there at some point. This has been true for all five puzzles I’ve done so far.

Quality matters. One of the puzzles I got from the thrift store turned out to be a bear to solve only because it was so poorly made. This 650-piece puzzle was only 19.25 x 13.25 inches when finished and its tiny pieces did not stay together. At one point, I accidentally bumped the table and so much of the puzzle came apart that I almost gave up completely, even though I was over halfway done.

Some puzzlers challenge themselves by not looking at the box, but you don’t have to do this. I keep thinking I’m going to ignore the picture on the box but so far I’ve only managed it for one puzzle. The rest have been too hard (or I was in too much of a hurry) for me to fly blind.

Sorting by shape and searching for pieces based on shape works well, you just have to have the patience to stop and do the sorting.

The more you do, the faster it goes. The longer you work on the puzzle, the more you understand what it’s about, and the fewer number of pieces you have to choose from, so it makes sense. But it feels like magic as you race to the finish after going so slowly at first.

My current puzzle is “The World of Birds” by David Sibley and Eurographics. It’s pretty difficult, mainly because of the white background and the fact that they repeated species (three American goldfinches, for example) or have lots of members of the same group (thrushes, I’m looking at you.) I have the advantage of familiarity with most of the birds in this puzzle. As I was getting started, I could pick up a piece and tell what kind of bird it belonged to, which made it easy for me to put all the larger birds together.

I think I’m going faster on this that I did on “Great Wall.” If I was working at the same rate, it would take me 84.3 hours to solve, but I just hit 33 hours and am well over half done. Of course, I still have to deal with the many all-white pieces that go in the background…

What rabbit hole have you gone down lately and what was the most interesting thing you learned?