Jigsaw
A free jigsaw that runs in the browser. Tap a piece in the tray, tap a space on the board, and it lands there. A wrong space takes the piece anyway, and you can lift it back out. The picture is finished when every piece is home.
- Free
- No ads
- No account
- No download
- Works offline
- Single player
How do you play?
- Pick a level - Six pieces, twelve or twenty. Switching also deals a new picture.
- Tap a piece - One of the pieces in the tray under the board. It gets a ring around it.
- Tap a space - The piece lands there, even when that is not where it belongs.
- Lift it back - Tapping a piece already on the board returns it to the tray and hands it to you.
- Swap - Holding a piece and tapping an occupied space trades them. The old one goes back to the tray.
About this game
Tap a piece. Tap a space. That is it.
There is no dragging here at all, and that is not laziness. A four-year-old's hand does not hold a continuous path across a screen, and neither does anyone using alternative input. Two taps do the identical job and work for everybody, so two taps is what this game has. Drag may be layered on top later, but it will never replace this.
A wrong space accepts the piece. That is a decision rather than a bug: trying a piece somewhere and seeing that it does not belong is exactly how a jigsaw gets solved, and refusing the placement would turn the puzzle into a quiz. What does that cost? We ran 20,000 games with a bot that never looks at the picture and only remembers what it has already tried. Six pieces take it 13.5 placements on average, twelve take 44.9, and twenty take 115.2. A child who looks finishes in six, twelve or twenty exactly. So looking is worth 2.3 times on the small cut and 5.8 times on the big one.
That number came out twice, by two different methods, which is why it is quotable. The simulation played the real game. The arithmetic says finding the right piece among k takes (k+1)/2 tries on average, so a whole board is n(n+3)/4, which gives 13.5, 45 and 115. They meet.
The pictures are the key art of other games on this site. There are eight of them, and that is the admission: a child who solves ten puzzles will see one come round again. We chose it deliberately, because bespoke art for every puzzle would add weight to every first visit to the site, including visits by people who never open this game.
What does it teach?
Spatial reasoning
Turning an image over in your head and deciding where it belongs is the ability geometry will ask for later.
Persistence
Twenty pieces take a while. A board that does not end in thirty seconds teaches staying with it.
Part and whole
Seeing that a picture is made of pieces is the step before fractions.
Fixing without restarting
A piece in the wrong place breaks nothing. Lift it out and try again.
Tips
Corners first
The four corners are the only pieces with two flat sides, so they are the easiest to recognise and they fix the orientation of everything else.
Follow a line that stops
A long line in the drawing, the edge of a hill or a table, carries straight on into the piece next door. It is the strongest clue on the board.
A big flat colour is a weak clue
A piece that is all one background colour fits almost anywhere. Save it for the end, when only two spaces are left for it.
Do not skip twelve
Blind play jumps from 44.9 placements to 115.2 between the two cuts, and that gap is exactly the amount your eye has to cover. The middle level is where it learns to.
What age is it for?
3 to 4
Six pieces. Solvable in six placements, and even a blind bot finishes in 13.5.
5 to 6
Twelve. Still comes together after a few tries, but looking starts to pay.
7 and up
Twenty. There are 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 ways to lay them out and one of them is the picture.
Grown-ups
Twenty placements on twenty pieces is perfect. It is harder than it sounds.
Accessibility
One tap per action and no dragging anywhere, so the game works with alternative input and with a small hand that does not aim well yet. This is not a reduced version of the puzzle, it is the only way to play it here. There is no clock and no countdown, so you can stop in the middle and think for as long as you want. No placement is ever wrong, so there is no error sound and nothing to lose, and a counter shows how many pieces are already home. Every space carries its column, its row and the piece sitting in it as its label, so a screen reader can tell them apart instead of reading the same word twenty times. The whole game can be played in silence with nothing lost.
Playing together
Half each
One takes the top row and one takes the bottom. Suddenly you have to talk to each other.
Count the placements
Same level, two devices, and count how many it took. The lowest possible number is the number of pieces.
Explain the corner
Ask how you knew that piece was a corner. A child who can answer is reading the picture.
Backwards
Take a finished picture apart and put it back together from the last piece to the first.
Common questions
Do I have to drag the pieces?
No, and you cannot. Tap a piece, then tap a space. Two taps do the identical job and they work for a small hand and for alternative input.
What happens if I put a piece in the wrong place?
Nothing. It sits there until you lift it out. There is no error sound, no points are taken, and the picture is simply not finished yet.
How many pictures are there?
Eight, and all of them are the key art of other games on this site. After ten puzzles you will see one come round again.
What does the record measure?
How many placements it took to finish, where fewer is better. The floor is the number of pieces, so six, twelve or twenty.
Does it remember where I was?
Yes. The picture, the pieces already home and what is left in the tray all come back, on that device, exactly as you left them.
Can I turn the pieces round?
There is no need to. Every piece is already the right way up, so the only question is where it goes. That takes a whole step out of the puzzle for a three-year-old and leaves the part that teaches, which is reading the picture.