9 Expert Tips for Jigsaw Puzzling

When it comes to analog hobbies, the humble jigsaw puzzle is one of life’s greatest choose-your-own-adventure options. You can do it solo or with friends. You can make it cooperative or competitive. You can talk the whole time or play your favorite podcast in the background. And you can buy a puzzle featuring virtually any picture on planet Earth—even one from your own camera roll.

Since its inception in 1987, Elms Puzzles has produced sumptuously handcrafted wooden puzzles that enthusiasts champion as the height of the form. So, who better to help us level up our puzzling than those on the inside? We chatted with Elms Puzzles owner (and lifelong Elms fan) Chris Danner and Elms Puzzles cutter (and co-owner) Shay Carmichael on all things jigsaw, from choosing the perfect puzzle to involving your puzzle-averse pals.

1. Pick the Best Puzzle Image for You ...
2. ... And the Right Type of Puzzle for You, Too
3. Optimize Your Environment 
4. Decide Whether to Consult the Image
5. Keep an Eye Out for Tricks
6. Do an Easy Puzzle on Hard Mode
7. Make It a Competition
8. Meet Non-Puzzlers on Their Terms
9. Try Multitasking

Pick the Best Puzzle Image for You ...

When choosing a puzzle, you don’t have to throw out your own artistic tastes in favor of some compositional gold standard. It all depends on what you’re drawn to and what kind of puzzling experience you’re interested in.

“I think what makes a great puzzle is similar but still distinctive components interacting in different places of the puzzle,” Danner says. “For hand-cuts specifically, I like expanses of very similar tones, shades, and colors, because it takes away the clues. It makes you double down on the artisan’s cut to focus on what’s unique about a very specific piece.” As a former art history major, he also loves “exploring classical paintings, one pixel at a time.”

Carmichael gravitates toward the opposite. “I like bright colors, psychedelic—I like something different,” she says. “I like steam punk, though sometimes those are kind of dark. … So each of us has our own preferences already in artwork or what speaks to us or we like to explore. Whatever that happens to be, that’s what makes a good puzzle image.”

... And the Right Type of Puzzle for You, Too

Puzzle quality isn’t quite so subjective. There’s nothing wrong with doing a mass-produced cardboard puzzle, typically made with a die-cutting machine. But people generally agree that wooden puzzles are superior, in part because their chunky pieces feel nicer and fit together more precisely (not to mention that they last much longer).

Not all wooden puzzles are created equal. Some are made with laser cutters, while others are made by hand using scroll saws—and artisans of hand-cut wooden puzzles can tell you why their pieces are the cream of the crop. “They’re thicker, they’re tighter, they just feel different,” Carmichael says. “You can hear them click when you put them in. … They’re very tactile {and} every one is individual, which is fun because you don’t end up with the same shapes over and over and over. Each piece can feel like its own little piece of artwork.” (Though that’s not to say laser-cut wooden puzzles can’t offer an artisanal experience in their own right.)

With hand-cut puzzles, it’s also easy to pick up sections of interlocked pieces without them falling apart. “The laser puzzles I’ve done, I’ve not been able to do that at all,” Carmichael says. “Because the laser cuts a wider curve, they’re too loose, and the wood is thinner. You have to scooch them around. … And then with cardboard puzzles, it just depends on the brand, whether they’re scooch-able or pick-up-able.”

Still, the Elms folks feel that enthusiasm for any kind of puzzle is a net positive for them. “We know that handcrafted puzzles are still a tiny, tiny niche—that most people don’t even know {they} exist,” Danner says. “But the more people that love puzzles, the more people are gonna learn about wooden puzzles, {and} the more people that love wooden puzzles, the more people are gonna discover hand-cuts.” To him, it’s a rising tide lifting all boats.

They also realize money can be a barrier to entry. A 50-piece made-to-order Elms puzzle is $150, while the going rate for a 200-piece puzzle is $600. Sure, a 200-piece Elms puzzle will likely take you much longer to do (and will certainly hold up much better) than a larger cardboard puzzle—and you can rent larger Elms puzzles for just $95. But most people can’t afford to buy an Elms puzzle as often as they would a cardboard one. As Carmichael points out, “there aren’t enough artisans to produce that many puzzles” anyway. “I think it’s a complementary stream from the cardboard to the lasers to us,” she says.

Optimize Your Environment 

The baseline requirement for doing a puzzle is a well-lit, flat surface. Natural light is ideal—Carmichael’s go-to puzzling surface, for example, is her breakfast table, whose best feature is that “it gets a lot of southern sun exposure.” But if you’re like Danner, who “mostly puzzle{s} in either the really early morning or really late at night,” any non-fluorescent indirect light will suffice. Another consideration is table height, “because sometimes you want to stand up and move around, and if it’s too low you’re gonna have back issues,” Danner says. “You want to be able to puzzle sitting or standing, depending on how your momentum gets going.” (Carmichael’s sunlit breakfast table also has the advantage of being bar-height.)

Danner and Carmichael are both avid users of puzzle boards, whose shallow drawers are perfect for organizing your puzzle pieces by color and/or section. Plus, they’re easy to move off the table if it’s pulling double duty for dining. Carmichael sometimes sets her puzzle board on a TV tray, she says, “or I can just sit on the couch with it on my lap.”

Decide Whether to Consult the Image

Even if you know the subject of your puzzle—a Venice canal, some festive cats, etc.—it’s still tough to identify what each piece is and where each section will end up without consistently consulting the image.

“If you’re using the image, I think you discover how much detail there is on such a tiny section of it,” Danner says. By studying the minute artistic merits of every piece in direct relation to the larger picture—a constant process of zooming in and out—you might appreciate all that detail more than you otherwise would. There’s also a matching element baked into this mode: Either you’re looking for specific pieces that match what you see in the larger image, or you’re shifting sections to match where they’re located in said image.

Assembling a puzzle without the image is more of a series of small mysteries. “And I have to guess,” Carmichael explains, “Is it upside down? Is it right side up? Is this sky? Is this water? What is this? And that part is a puzzle in itself. So, personally I find it more enjoyable not to have the image.” As Danner puts it, “You’re all of a sudden rearranging things and flipping things over, and it’s all coming together in a way that you just couldn’t plan or organize when you first sit down.” It might be more frustrating for people whose main focus is finishing the puzzle as quickly as possible—but if yours isn’t, you may find it especially rewarding to watch the composition slowly materialize in front of you. There’s no right or wrong mode; it’s just a matter of deciding which one seems more fun.

Keep an Eye Out for Tricks

Elms artisans and other puzzle makers have an arsenal of tricks at their disposal that can turn even a 100- or 200-piece puzzle into hours of entertainment. With made-to-order Elms puzzles, you get to dictate the difficulty level by choosing the border style (regular or irregular) and quantity of cutting tricks (some, many, or very few).

A wavy border means you can’t count on a bunch of straight-edged pieces to be your road map—though a straight border has trick potential, too. Look out for split corners: when the cutter splits a corner into two pieces right at the point. That way, they look like two regular border pieces, and you can’t immediately tell that they’ll combine to form a corner.

“But of course, then in the middle of the puzzle … we can cut it so that it looks like a corner piece,” Carmichael says. “So if you’re sorting your pieces … and you’re like, ‘I have five corners, this must be a trick’ … as you’re doing the puzzle, you might discover that absolutely none of those were actually corners.” The same thing can happen with other border pieces: Any piece with a straight edge could actually belong in the center of your puzzle. 

Another trick is border pieces that touch each other without interlocking; you need a third piece to connect them. Without knowing that, it’s harder to recognize that the two border pieces go side by side. And then there’s color-line cutting: cutting along the line where two colors meet. So you might have a fully blue sky piece and a fully green leaf piece that connect, but you’ll have to figure it out on shape alone—there’s no little blue patch of sky on the green piece to clue you in.

A kind of inverse of color-line cutting is “stack cutting” or “double cutting,” Carmichael explains, “where you put a piece of wood on top of the other piece of wood, and then you cut the piece so that the two pieces are the same shape.” So you have to rely on the image, not the shape, to determine which piece goes where. Need a hint? With wood puzzles, you can flip the pieces over to look for patterns in the wood grain. (Whether that counts as cheating is for you and your fellow puzzlers to decide.)

Do an Easy Puzzle on Hard Mode

Wood grain is also one key to making an easy puzzle much harder. “To pass the time on planes,” Danner says, he’ll flip a whole puzzle face down and use the wood grain as his only image guide. “You can take a puzzle that would take you 20 minutes and get an hour out of it.”

Carmichael has a different hard mode: “I take one piece, put it down, and I cannot place any other pieces unless they touch that piece.” So instead of having multiple “islands”—groups of connected pieces—to work off, you just have one. And if she sees two pieces that she knows will connect to each other, but not to her island? “I don’t do it.”

Make It a Competition

It takes a special kind of patience to stick to a single island, which might be tough for people who find jigsaw puzzles a bit tedious to begin with. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to activate their competitive drive.

Consider puzzle chess. “Two people. One puzzle. Timers,” Carmichael says. You typically use a simple puzzle and construct the border together—and then the game proceeds more or less like competitive chess. You start your timer, place one puzzle piece anywhere in the puzzle, and stop your timer. Your opponent then does the same, and you alternate until the puzzle is done. The winner is whoever has the fastest total time at the end (meaning that, on the whole, you placed pieces faster than your opponent did). It’s a fun way to inject a little rivalry into what’s still a collaborative activity—you’re working together on one puzzle, but you’re both trying to outpace each other.

A slightly larger group might try what Carmichael calls a “puzzle party,” which could take whatever form you want it to. One option is to pool all the puzzle pieces from different puzzles in the middle of the table and task each person with completing their own puzzle. The winner is whoever finishes first. (Or you could shift around at intervals so everyone gets a chance to work on each puzzle.) You could also give each person the same small puzzle and have them race to finish.

Meet Non-Puzzlers on Their Terms

What about puzzle-averse people who can’t be tempted by gamification? “A lot of times I’ll say, ‘Why don’t you work on the border and I’ll work on the inside?’ Because the border might be easier,” Carmichael says. But she also knows to cut her losses when someone simply finds the activity too frustrating. “I would just ask them to be, like, the bartender then. I don’t ever try to force or coerce anybody into doing puzzles. If it’s something someone really doesn’t like, you know, they just don’t like it. {You} may not be able to convert.”

It also might help to position puzzling more as a “facilitator for communication” than as the main event, Danner says. “It’s one thing to invite a friend over and pour a couple of glasses of wine and sit opposite a table and just have a direct conversation. But it’s sometimes easier and more fun to both be plucking at little pieces and letting that sort of let everyone’s guard down and let the conversation flow from there.” 

In short, a puzzle neutralizes awkward silences without discouraging conversation—which can make it a better option for a background social activity than, say, TV. “Growing up, we didn’t do the TV-after-dinner thing. We rented an Elms puzzle and just always had it out,” Danner says. “The moment the dishes were cleared, the puzzle came out, and we all ended up staying at the table for hours talking. As an alternative to Netflix or to some other digital form of entertainment, it’s just incredibly enjoyable.”

Try Multitasking

That said, jigsaw puzzles and digital media aren’t mutually exclusive; even the experts double up. During what Carmichael calls “puzzle weekends,” she and her sister like to toss on a show like Bridgerton or Survivor while they puzzle the hours away. “We don’t get out of our pajamas,” she says. Food Network contests work well, too—anything interesting that you can also periodically tune out.

Podcasts are another popular background activity among puzzlers. Danner’s genre of choice is history—especially the UK-based hit The Rest Is History—while Carmichael favors true crime, more often when she’s cutting puzzles than doing them. “I’ve been listening to Morbid lately, a lot,” she says.

And since jigsaw puzzles don’t involve reading or listening, it’s fairly easy to do one during a conference call without losing focus on either one. “I will literally turn my camera off and work on puzzles at my desk on calls where I’m like, ‘I don’t need to be totally in this right now,’ ” Danner says.

Discover Other Expert Tips: