Puzzle is one of the most popular puzzle games. It is a flat drawing divided into many parts of the same size. Before layout, they are mixed, and the player's task is to reassemble the picture, arranging its fragments by colors and textures.
From English, jigsaw puzzle is translated as “jigsaw puzzle”, and initially puzzles were really made using a jigsaw, with which solid canvases were sawn into many small pieces.
According to experts, assembling such puzzles develops logic, attentiveness and fine motor skills, and also teaches you to find connections between parts and a single whole. Today, children and adults are fond of puzzles, and they have long become an integral part of our lives.
History of the game
The basis for the invention of puzzles (in their current form) was the puzzle of the English cartographer John Spilsbury. It was made in 1766 from a geographical map of the world, pasted on a wooden base and sawn into many parts along the borders of states. Spilsbury used this puzzle to teach his students, who had to assemble the original world map from fragments from memory.
With the advent of jigsaws in 1906, making such puzzles (called dissection) became much easier, and they began to be called jigsaw puzzle. Accordingly, jigsaw is translated from English as "jigsaw". Originally, puzzles were not entertainment, but were used as teaching aids. The fragments of the puzzle did not have side recesses/protrusions, and were placed inside the frames on a solid base of appropriate sizes.
By the beginning of the 20th century, puzzles had become widespread in England, and then in the United States of America, and were put into mass production. Instead of expensive and difficult to process wood, soft and pliable cardboard began to be used for them. In 1909, the world's first production of jigsaw puzzles with fastening parts was opened in the USA, which looked similar to the modern one.
The general production technology, a century later, has remained the same: cardboard sheets with printed images are cut into many fragments with a press punch stamp, and more expensive types of puzzles - made of natural wood - are cut with an electric jigsaw. Previously, this work was carried out manually, but today it is done on high-precision CNC machines: according to ready-made layouts / matrices.
Interesting facts
A little more than a century has passed since the appearance of the first puzzles, and this type of puzzle is relatively new in world history. Nevertheless, rapidly gaining popularity all over the world, the puzzle has managed to gather a lot of interesting facts and records around itself.
- The world's largest jigsaw puzzle was created in 2018 in Dubai. It depicted the founder and first president of the United Arab Emirates, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. The area of the puzzle exceeded 6,000 square meters, and the number of elements was 12,320 units.
- The jigsaw puzzle with the largest number of pieces to assemble was made in Vietnam in 2011, with 551,232 pieces included. The size of the assembled puzzle is 14.85 × 23.20 meters. The puzzle was assembled by 1,600 students from the Ho Chi Minh University of Economics, who completed the task in 17 hours.
- The puzzle with the smallest details was made in Italy in 2022. Each of them has an area of less than 0.36 cm². The size of the assembled puzzle is 6.5 × 5.5 centimeters and consists of 99 pieces.
- The fastest 1000-piece puzzle was completed by Sarah Mills at the 2018 UK Championship. It took her 1 hour 52 minutes to solve the puzzle, and the result was listed in the Guinness Book of Records.
- The world's most expensive jigsaw puzzle was sold at The Golden Retriever Foundation in 2005 for $27,000. It was handmade from natural wood, included 467 elements and depicted cats, birds, horses and dogs.
- The largest collection of puzzles belongs to Luisa Figueiredo from Brazil. It includes 1047 sets of different years of production, the first of which Louise acquired back in 1967.
It is difficult to say what exactly in the 21st century attracts collectors and ordinary people to such a simple and uncomplicated game as puzzles. Despite the huge variety of other board and computer games, they are still very popular and in high demand.
Only, unlike the 20th century, you can now collect them not physically, but on the screen of a computer or mobile gadget. The largest online puzzle presented in the US in 2020 included 1.2 million pieces, and this is far from the limit. For lovers of simpler puzzles, standard puzzles of 50, 100 parts are suitable.
Collecting puzzles online is a useful and exciting activity. Knowing the rules, you can easily solve the puzzle and have a meaningful time.