Jigsaw puzzle sales have soared in 2020, as households turn to jigsaw puzzling for lockdown entertainment. During this chaotic year, jigsaw puzzles have proved the ideal companion, with the process of solving them offering a sense of progress and order.
Whether undertaken solo or cooperatively with friends and family, jigsaw puzzling provides a relaxing and rewarding experience, offering escapism and a sense of accomplishment. Bringing families together for over 250 years, jigsaw puzzles have today emerged as the ultimate detox from the pervasive presence of digital games. You don’t have to be creative to create something special, and the end goal is always attainable, however long it might take to get there!
Studies have linked jigsaws to a range of health and mindfulness benefits for puzzlers of all ages. New products have emerged to challenge and entertain everyone, from beginners to experts. With more people spending time at home, and many searching for something to divert their mind from their problems and their eyes from their screens, now is the perfect time to pick up a jigsaw puzzle and begin your adventure.
But before you begin, you might want to learn more about this popular and evolving pastime. So here we bring you: Everything you wanted to know about jigsaw puzzles.
Jigsaw Puzzling: Yoga for the Mind
Neurology researcher Patrick Fissler has found that jigsaw puzzles activate up to 8 cognitive functions at the same time, targeting both sides of the brain. The right hemisphere of the brain, controlling creativity, emotions, and intuition, and the left hemisphere, the logical, objective, and methodical side, must work together to solve a jigsaw puzzle, providing a powerfully stimulating mental exercise.
Puzzlers must analyse what is on the puzzle piece and where it fits into the larger image, using mental rotation to fit the pieces together. Connecting colours and shapes in this way can help children develop cognitive skills fundamental to their development, while doing this exercise regularly can help puzzlers of all ages improve their visual-spatial reasoning.
Jigsaw puzzling offers significant benefits for the memory, which is put to the test as we search for missing pieces and match colours and shapes. Exercising the part of the brain responsible for storing this type of information helps to maintain and improve short-term memory. A study from Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience suggests that jigsaw puzzling can reduce the risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers at the University of Michigan found that 25 minutes a day spent solving puzzles can raise your IQ. Puzzling strengthens existing neural connections and generates new ones, increasing processing speed and training puzzlers to concentrate on small details, helping them to become more precise.
Puzzlers are problem solvers, and the skills learned from solving jigsaw puzzles can be transferred to school and work, helping you to become a more creative, flexible, and critical thinker. The focus required for a jigsaw puzzle trains you to concentrate for long periods, helping you to become more productive. Some workplaces have introduced jigsaw puzzles into office spaces to help employees disconnect from work for a few minutes before returning to work refreshed.
Another great mental benefit is the dopamine release we get when we put a piece in the right place. Dopamine regulates our mood and affects learning, memory, concentration, and motivation. As we solve jigsaw puzzles we enter a meditative, dream-like state, relaxing our minds, decreasing our stress levels, and even lowering our blood pressure and heart rate!
With the current focus on mindfulness activities, puzzling provides an engaging and fun option to relax and rejuvenate our minds. Anne Williams, author of The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together a History, reported: “A lot of people have told me that when they’re doing a puzzle they just shut out all their worries, they just concentrate on matching pieces.”
And most importantly, they divert our attention away from the screens that dominate our lives today. Prolonged screen time disrupts our sleeping patterns, strains our eyes, and damages our physical and mental health. The jigsaw puzzle provides a compelling distraction, giving us a target to aim for without any pressure.
Although it might not seem like your usual workout, jigsaw puzzles also provide physical exercise. Puzzling requires basic motor skills and coordination. Princeton University researchers found that jigsaw puzzles improved dexterity, exercising small muscles in the fingers and eyes. Occupational therapists use jigsaw puzzles to retrain the fingers and hands after traumatic injuries.
Finally, jigsaw puzzles can provide hours of entertainment for the whole family at a relatively cheap price. Solving a puzzle together can help develop cooperation and teamwork skills in children and adults (apart from the customary battle over who gets to insert the final piece!)
Products
The first jigsaw puzzle is thought to have been created by English mapmaker John Spilsbury in the 1760s. He pasted a map onto a wooden board and cut it into pieces, challenging people to reassemble it. Spilsbury’s “dissected maps” were used to teach geography, and his innovation endures today, with map jigsaw puzzles remaining popular. Why not try piecing together an ancient world map, a London Underground map, or a Paris street map?
Today there is a greater range of jigsaw puzzles than ever before, with something to suit every taste.
The traditional jigsaw puzzle requires puzzlers to complete an image printed on the box. Children’s puzzles can range from 2 to 200 pieces, and popular themes include animals, dinosaurs, and cartoon characters. The possibilities are endless. Does your child like Thomas the Tank Engine, the StoryBots, or Dora the Explorer? Perhaps Peppa Pig is more their style? Are they a Star Wars fan? How about SpongeBob? All of these shows are stars of the puzzle world, allowing your child to recreate their favourite characters and scenes in jigsaw form!
There are jigsaw puzzles for all ages. Older children and nostalgic adults might enjoy taking a trip back to the ‘90s with a jigsaw puzzle devoted to The Simpsons, or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or perhaps a scene from Friends, with a wide range of puzzles being based on the Central Perk coffeehouse. The M&S Disney jigsaw puzzles are popular with all ages, and the Oliver Bonas range has proven a lockdown hit, with titles like Inspirational Women, Endangered World, and The Donut Lover’s.
Art provides another popular category for jigsaw puzzles. Pomegranate creates fine art reproductions of works by artists such as Monet and Van Gogh. Learn more about your favourite paintings as you solve the puzzles, discovering new details and learning about brush strokes and colours. The sweeping landscapes and animated scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder make ideal jigsaws, while the jigsaw puzzle paintings of Georges Seurat invite you to explore his beautiful experiments with colour.
Speaking of beautiful colours, the vivid colour spectrums of gradient puzzles will test even the most experienced of puzzlers. Based on blocks of pure colour which gradually change in hue as you move across the image, these puzzles are solved by recognising the slight variations of colour from piece to piece.
The Wasgij puzzles by Jumbo Games offer a twist on the puzzling experience – ‘Wasgij’ is ‘Jigsaw’ spelt backwards. Instead of requiring puzzlers to piece together the image printed on the box, the Wasgij challenges puzzlers to use their imagination. The picture on the box is not the picture to be recreated! Puzzlers have to put themselves in the position of a particular character who appears in the picture shown on the box. Then they have to imagine what that character is seeing in front of them to get the image to be pieced together.
Ravensburger Escape Puzzles combine the jigsaw with the escape room. Puzzlers uncover secrets as they piece together items that will assist in their escape. They make an ideal game for social gatherings, as friends and family work together to puzzle their way out and complete the picture.
Personalised jigsaw puzzles put your own pictures in the frame, allowing you to recreate your favourite moments! Websites like Snapfish, Zazzle, and Shutterfly will take your treasured family photos or artwork and create custom jigsaw puzzles. You can even puzzle on the go with a series of digital jigsaw apps such as Jigsaw Explorer and ZiMad’s Magic Jigsaw Puzzles.
Jigsaw puzzles have even gone 3D, challenging puzzlers to piece together models of cars, animals, and famous landmarks.
Tips and Accessories
There are many different ways to puzzle, and we will all (hopefully!) arrive at the same place, with that magnificent sight of a solved jigsaw!
But there are some tricks that will speed up the journey, and some accessories that will improve the experience. We have consulted popular jigsaw YouTuber Karen Puzzles for some pro tips:
- Locate the corners first.
- Find all the edge pieces, and put them together to create the frame of the puzzle.
- Position all the pieces colour side up. You could use the box trays to space out the pieces, but that will prevent you from looking at the box image. Sorting boxes are custom-made for this job, but you could create your own spare trays out of cardboard.
- Sort the pieces into groups by colour or object, making it easier to work on specific sections of the puzzle. If you’re working as a team you could assign different sections to your friends and family, helping you to solve the puzzle quicker!
- Puzzle mats provide the ideal workspace for jigsaw puzzling, and allow you to tidy away your incomplete jigsaws and even take them away with you.
- You want as much light as you can get on your puzzle. Desk lamps are popular with puzzlers, and some even use head torches!
- Keep your puzzle pieces in a zip-lock bag inside the box to keep them safe and avoid any “missing piece” disasters.
- If you ever get stuck, turn the puzzle upside down – the new perspective might help.
Record Breakers
Enthusiasts have taken the simple hobby of jigsaw puzzles to new extremes.
Competitive puzzlers try to complete their jigsaws faster than their opponents, either solo or in teams. There is even a World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship held every year in Spain.
The Guinness World Record for competing Guinness’s official 250-piece jigsaw is 13 minutes 7 seconds.
The largest ever jigsaw puzzle was completed in Dubai in 2018, with 12,320 pieces measuring a combined total of over 65,000 square feet!
The biggest commercially available puzzles contain around 50,000 pieces.
Students in Vietnam created the jigsaw puzzle with the most pieces. Their gigantic puzzle had 551,232 pieces. Not recommended for the Christmas stocking!
The largest hand-cut jigsaw puzzle had 40,000 pieces, and was designed by a puzzle-maker in Weymouth in 2013. Unfortunately the whole thing collapsed as he put the final piece in, and the disastrous moment was captured on camera!
A royal puzzle cabinet, containing some of the jigsaw puzzles used to teach King George IV geography as a young child, was recently sold at auction for £56,400.
A Timeless Tradition
Although jigsaw puzzles have been around for over 250 years, their current popularity indicates that they are here to stay. Jigsaw puzzles first exploded in popularity during the Great Depression of the 1930s, providing a welcome distraction and cheap entertainment for a world contending with unemployment and uncertainty. The COVID pandemic has brought similar challenges in 2020, and puzzle makers have reported a bumper year. Gibsons, one of the UK’s leading jigsaw companies, recorded a year-on-year sales increase of 132%, while Buffalo Games in the USA were making 2 million puzzles a month to meet the demand.
Mindfulness groups have championed jigsaw puzzles as a useful metaphor for life. While puzzling encourages us to enter a meditative state, the puzzling process teaches us to be patient, break bigger challenges into smaller ones, and search for solutions. As we search, we begin to understand how small pieces fit together to create a bigger picture.
Perhaps the most important reason for the longevity of jigsaw puzzles is those eureka moments – fitting in a piece, completing a mission, and creating something together. Those are the moments that keep us coming back for more!
