Jigsaw Puzzle

How to play Jigsaw Puzzle

Jigsaw Puzzle is a relaxing drag-and-drop picture puzzle. A single original image is sliced into a grid of square pieces, the pieces are shuffled into a tray, and your job is to rebuild the picture by moving each piece back to the square it came from. It is the timeless tabletop pastime reimagined for your phone or browser: no tiny cardboard tabs to lose down the sofa, no box to store, and a fresh picture whenever you want one. Pick a picture from the small gallery, choose how many pieces you want, and start assembling. The rules take seconds to learn, yet a full 5×5 board is a genuinely satisfying challenge, and because every completed puzzle is timed and scored you always have a personal best to chase.

The goal

The goal is simple: put every piece back in its correct place so the original picture is whole again. The board is an empty grid of squares, and each piece belongs to exactly one square. When every piece sits in its home square the picture is complete and the puzzle is solved. You are scored on how quickly you finish and how few mistakes you make along the way, so a tidy, thoughtful solve beats a frantic one.

The board, the tray and the pieces

On the left (or top on a narrow screen) is the board — the target grid where the finished picture will appear. Below it is the tray, holding all the pieces in a shuffled order. Each piece shows its own slice of the picture, so you can recognise a patch of sky, a petal or a splash of colour and work out where it belongs. Choose Easy for a 3×3 board (9 pieces), Medium for 4×4 (16 pieces) or Hard for 5×5 (25 pieces). A small gallery lets you pick which original picture to assemble, and the "Show hint image" button paints a faint copy of the finished picture behind the board so you can see roughly where each piece should go.

Placing pieces

• Drag a piece from the tray and drop it onto a square on the board. On a touch screen use your finger; with a mouse, press and drag. A floating preview follows your pointer so you can aim precisely.
• Prefer tapping? Tap a piece to select it (it gets a blue outline), then tap the square where it should go. Tap the same piece again to deselect it.
• Drop a piece onto a square that is already filled and the two pieces swap — the one that was there goes back to the tray (or trades places with the piece you moved). Nothing is ever lost, so you can rearrange freely.
• When a piece lands on its correct square it snaps in and locks with a green border. Locked pieces stay put — you cannot drag them away by accident — which lets you build outward from the parts you have already solved. To pull a misplaced piece back, drag it into the tray.

Winning, time and score

The puzzle is solved the instant the last piece locks into its correct square. The faint hint image brightens to reveal the finished picture in full, and a banner shows your time and move count. Your score rewards speed and accuracy: you start from a base that grows with the piece count, then lose one point per second taken and twenty points per misplacement (each time you drop a piece into a wrong square). The score can never fall below 1 or rise above 99,999, and your best result on each board size is saved on your device and, when you are signed in, sent to the leaderboard.

Every picture is original art

There are no photographs or copyrighted images anywhere in this game. Every picture in the gallery — the sunset, the mandala, the aurora, the prism and the flower — is drawn entirely in code from gradients and geometric shapes, generated fresh as clean vector graphics. That means the artwork is completely license-free and self-authored: nothing is scanned, downloaded or traced from someone else's work. It also means the pictures stay crisp at any size and load instantly, even offline, because there is no image file to fetch — the puzzle literally draws its own art.

Strategy tips

• Start with the corners and edges. Corner pieces have two flat picture-edges and edge pieces have one, so they are the easiest to identify and give you a reliable frame to build inward from.
• Sort by colour and feature. Group pieces that share a colour or a distinctive detail — a band of sky, the bright centre of the flower, a spoke of the prism — then place those clusters together.
• Use the hint image when you are stuck. Turning on the faint reference shows roughly where each colour belongs; turn it off again for a tougher, higher-scoring solve.
• Mind your misplacements. Because each wrong drop costs twenty points, it is worth pausing to be fairly sure before you place a piece, rather than dropping pieces at random and swapping later.
• Build in connected regions. Once a piece locks, place its neighbours next — matching how the picture continues across the seam is far easier than judging an isolated square in the middle of the board.

Frequently asked questions