Jigsaw

Build the frame first

The oldest jigsaw trick is still the best one: find the four corner pieces and the flat-edged border pieces, and build the outer frame before you touch the middle. Corners have two straight sides, edges have exactly one, so they're the only pieces whose position you can pin down early. With the border closed, a loose scatter of pieces becomes a bounded space, and every piece inside now has a limit to work against.

Puzzle people even have names for the bumps and hollows on each piece: the bump is a tab, the hollow is a blank. When two pieces look the same shade, their tab pattern is often what tells them apart. In this game you press and drag a piece toward its spot, and when it's close enough it snaps in and locks. That snap is instant confirmation you were right, so you never second-guess a near miss, and a locked piece never needs handling again. Your attention stays on the ones still loose.

Sort by shade, then pick your piece count

Every game generates a fresh abstract picture, so you can't lean on recognising a face or a familiar landmark. You're matching by colour and tone instead. Group the loose pieces into rough piles by shade and finish one region at a time, rather than hunting across the whole board for a single match. If you get stuck, turn on Preview to show a faint ghost of the finished image behind the frame; it tells you roughly where each patch of colour belongs. Some players call that a crutch and leave it off, which is a fair way to make the same puzzle harder.

The Difficulty menu offers 12, 24 or 40 pieces. Twelve is a warm-up you can finish inside a minute, and nearly every piece touches the border, so the frame trick almost solves it by itself. Forty is a proper sit-down puzzle where sorting really earns its keep, because scanning forty scattered pieces for one match gets slow fast. The clock runs in every mode, so a tidy method beats a frantic scramble every time.

It started as a geography lesson

Jigsaw puzzles began as a teaching tool. In the 1760s a London mapmaker named John Spilsbury glued a map onto a thin wooden board and cut along the country borders, so children could learn geography by putting Europe back together. He called them dissected maps, and they sold well enough that he made a business of it. His sets covered the world and its continents, subjects a school could justify buying. The name jigsaw came later, from the thin-bladed fretsaw, often called a jigsaw, that makers used to cut the wooden pieces.

The biggest puzzle craze arrived in the 1930s. During the Depression, cheap cardboard puzzles became one of the era's favourite ways to fill an evening in America, complete with weekly puzzle rentals and free puzzles given away as store promotions. The appeal hasn't really changed since: a jigsaw gives your hands something to do and your mind a steady stream of small, certain wins. This version just swaps the card table for a screen and adds a timer.

Beating the clock

Speed on a jigsaw doesn't come from moving your hand faster. It comes from never searching the whole pile. Spend the first stretch sorting: borders in one group, then piles by shade. It feels like lost time and it isn't, because every later pick now scans a small pile instead of the full board.

The other habit worth stealing from fast solvers is to place what's in front of you instead of hunting for one particular piece. If the piece you want isn't jumping out, drop the search, lock in three others, and come back. A solid plan for the 40-piece board looks like this: first stretch on sorting and corners, then close the border, then one shade region at a time, darkest first, because the darkest pieces are the easiest to tell apart. Leave the blandest patch of middle for last, when so few pieces remain that even lookalikes place themselves. On the 40-piece board that habit alone can cut a big chunk off your time, and it keeps the puzzle feeling like steady progress instead of a stuck search.