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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.

How to assemble jigsaw puzzles

Puzzles cannot be called a children's or adult puzzle - today it is played by both preschoolers and the elderly. It all depends on the complexity of the game, due to the type of image and the number of elements to build.

So, putting together a puzzle that depicts a continuous coniferous forest is much more difficult than a picture with a car, a person or a cartoon character.

This is explained by the fact that all trees are similar to each other, and it will be more difficult to sort the puzzle pieces into groups. And, of course, the fewer parts in the puzzle, the easier and faster it is assembled.

Rules of the game

Since the picture can be anything from landscapes to abstractions, each puzzle requires an individual approach. However, there is a general procedure that is the same for all puzzles. It consists of five stages:

Turn all pieces to be assembled right side up. This will greatly simplify their further selection and sorting.
Find the extreme details around the perimeter of the picture. They are easier to choose from the total mass, since the end parts always have less than four connections. Having assembled a frame from them, you can understand the general idea of the puzzle and the approximate location of objects in its central part.
Sort the parts by color and shade. For example, if the picture shows a red car against the background of a forest and a blue sky, you can immediately form three groups of parts: red, green and blue.
Select special details. Without having any one pronounced color, they can be the most contrasting and eye-catching. For example: inscriptions, patterns, borders, symbols, and so on.
Assemble individual blocks within the frame: by colors and eye-catching details.

If the picture is sufficiently contrasted and multicolored, the assembly will take place without much effort and with aesthetic pleasure. The situation is much more complicated with monotonous drawings, especially with puzzles, which are a repeating pattern. Only the most patient and diligent players will cope with this task, but the procedure for such puzzles is still identical to that described above.

Game hints

If you try to solve a puzzle for a long time and do not succeed in this activity, instead of having a good time, it will begin to cause impatience and irritation. To prevent this from happening, and the gameplay was easy and interesting, you should follow simple tips. They will speed up and simplify the assembly of the puzzle, even if it consists of 1000 or more elements. So, the following can be added to the list of useful tips:

Don't try to cover the entire field. Collect it in parts, focusing on certain areas / areas. The best solution would be to assemble the frame around the perimeter of the field, and only then fill in its central parts.
After assembling one of the center blocks, place it next to the frame, even if it doesn't fit with it yet. This will allow you to evaluate the overall composition and visualize it.
Having combined more than half of the details, start filling in the gaps between them in rows or columns using a simple selection method: from left to right or top to bottom. This automates the process and makes the assembly less monotonous and tedious.
Take breaks. Jigsaw puzzles are not called a puzzle for nothing: with the wrong approach, you can break your brain trying to solve a difficult problem. The game is supposed to be fun, so resting between builds is sometimes a must.

Another useful tip - do not start the game right away with large puzzles: 1000, 2000 pieces or more. First, you should practice on simple puzzles, get a feel for the game, work out tricks, and only then gradually complicate the tasks.

The choice of puzzles today is not limited by anything: they can be programmatically created from any graphic images of a suitable resolution. In many applications, this option works by default: you can upload both public pictures and private photos to them.

The main thing is that the gameplay gives you pleasure, because this is the point of all puzzles designed for one player. By applying mindfulness, logic and associativity, you can cope with even the most complex puzzle. The question will be only in the duration and complexity of the assembly.

Start with small and simple puzzles, over time you will appreciate the developing and calming effect of the old puzzle.