Set up a table bigger than the finished puzzle, with good light. Turn every piece picture side up, pulling out the edge pieces as you go. Build the border first. Sort the rest into piles by colour and pattern, then build whatever stands out in the picture (lettering, faces, strong lines) and join those sections to the border. Leave the sky and other plain areas until last, and do them by sorting the pieces by shape. Take breaks: a piece you couldn’t find for an hour often turns up in a minute with fresh eyes.
Before you start: the table and the light
The table. You need room for the finished puzzle plus space round it for loose pieces and sorting piles. Check the finished size on the box; our guide to puzzle sizes works out the table you need. If you can’t leave a table covered for a week, build on a large board or a roll-up puzzle mat that can be moved or put away.
The light. Most mistakes come from colours you can’t quite tell apart. Bright, even light helps a lot: daylight from a window, or a lamp set to one side so it doesn’t reflect straight back off glossy pieces. A daylight-coloured bulb shows colours closer to how they were printed than a warm one does.
Somewhere to sort. The box lid, a few trays, baking trays or plates are all fine. Anything with a rim stops pieces sliding about.
1. Turn every piece face up
Spread the pieces out and turn them all picture side up. It’s the slow, dull part, but you’re looking at every piece once, which is when you start to learn the colours. As you go, put every piece with a straight side in its own pile: those are the edge pieces. The corners have two straight sides.
2. Build the border
The border is the easiest part to find and the most useful to finish: it fixes the size of the puzzle and gives everything else something to join on to. Lay the four corners out roughly where they go, then build each side. The colours along the edge of the box picture tell you which side a piece belongs on.
If you can’t finish a side, don’t hunt for long. Missing edge pieces usually turn up later, mixed in with the others. You can also check the count: a puzzle cut as a grid of C columns and R rows has 2 × (C + R) − 4 edge pieces, four of them corners. A 1,000-piece puzzle cut 40 by 25 has 126. Count along one long and one short side of your border to work out your own grid.
3. Sort the rest by colour and pattern
Go through the loose pieces and sort them into piles that match areas of the picture: the red car, the green trees, the brick wall, the water. Don’t make too many piles; five to ten is plenty. Pieces that could go anywhere get a pile of their own and you come back to them.
Look at the pattern as well as the colour. Brickwork, wood grain, ripples on water, the weave of a cloth: these show you which way up a piece goes and roughly where it sits.
4. Start with what stands out
Build the parts of the picture that are easiest to recognise first: any lettering or numbers, faces, the edges of buildings, a horizon, strong straight lines and bright objects. Each one is a small puzzle on its own. Build them loose on the table, then slide them into place against the border once you can see where they go.
5. Work in sections
Take one pile at a time and finish that area before moving on. As sections grow they meet each other and the border, and the gaps left behind get smaller and easier. Keep the pile you’re working on close to the part of the puzzle it belongs to, so you’re not reaching across the table.
6. The hard parts: sort by shape
Eventually you reach the sky, the sea, a snowfield or a plain background, where the colour barely changes. Now the shape does the work. In a typical puzzle every inside piece has four sides, and each side is a knob that sticks out (a tab) or a hole that goes in (a blank). That gives six kinds of inside piece:
Sort the plain pieces into those six groups. Then look at a gap in the puzzle: count what the neighbours offer on each side (a tab sticking into the gap means the piece you need has a blank there) and take pieces only from the matching group. It turns a search through two hundred blue pieces into a search through thirty.
Two more clues help in plain areas. Skies are rarely one flat colour: they usually get lighter towards the horizon, so sort blue pieces from dark to light as well. And look at how a piece sits: a piece that only goes in if you press it, or that leaves a hairline gap, is almost always the wrong one, even if the colour looks right.
Ribbon cut and random cut
Most puzzles are ribbon cut (or grid cut): the pieces sit in neat rows and columns, so everything above about shapes works. A random cut puzzle has irregular pieces that don’t line up in rows. Sorting by shape helps less there, and colour and the picture matter more. Some boxes say which it is; if yours doesn’t, you can tell as soon as you turn the pieces over.
Take breaks
When you’ve stared at the same gap for twenty minutes, walk away. Coming back later, you see the colours fresh and often spot the piece straight away. It’s also why puzzles left on a table get finished: everyone who walks past puts in a piece or two.
If a piece is missing
Before you give up on it, look under the puzzle and the board, in the box and in the corners of its flaps, on the floor and the chairs, and check whether it’s stuck to the underside of another piece. If it’s really gone, some makers offer a replacement piece service, so it’s worth checking the maker’s website.
Practise without the table
Our free online jigsaw puzzle uses the same piece shapes and has an Edges only button, so you can try the method on a small puzzle in a few minutes. You can use one of your own photos, and it never leaves your device.