Jigsaw Puzzles

Coarse cuts, bright cartoon pictures, and nothing that can go wrong.

Puzzles for Kids

Rabbit Doll Jigsaw Puzzles for Kids

Smart Kids Puzzle

Animal Puzzle Kids

Sprunki Jigsaw Puzzle for Kids

Happy Kids Jigsaw

Animated heroes and drawn scenes rather than photographs.

Round jigsaw Puzzle 2 - Assemble Cartoon

Square jigsaw Puzzle 2 - Assemble Cartoon

Cartoon Airplanes: Jigsaw Puzzles

Rainbow Friend Cartoon Jigsaw

Cartoon Animal Puzzle

Cartoon Police Cars Puzzle

Sports cars, trucks and racers, cut into pieces.

Racing Cars Puzzle Time

Sport Cars Puzzle Challenge

Futuristic Cars Jigsaw

Old School Cars Jigsaw

Christmas Cars Jigsaw

Police Cars Match3 Puzzle Slide

The same picture, cut as fine as you like

A browser jigsaw is a picture cut into pieces you drag into place, and nearly every one lets you choose how many pieces before you start. A coarse cut of a dozen or so is a child's puzzle and takes a minute; a fine cut of several hundred is an evening. Some games add a rotation option, so a piece has to be turned as well as placed, which roughly doubles the difficulty; most show the finished picture in a corner, and the edge-first habit from the kitchen table works exactly the same here. Pieces snap when they are close enough, and a soft click is the usual confirmation.

This is the largest single shelf inside the puzzle games catalog by a wide margin, and also one of the gentlest: no timer unless you turn one on, no fail state, nothing to lose. That makes it a staple of the kids games hub at the coarse end and of the educational games shelf, where letters and maps are the pictures.

Categories:PuzzleEducational

Mouse, finger and screen size

On a desktop a jigsaw is a mouse game and nothing else: click, drag, release. A larger monitor is a real advantage, because the pieces stay big enough to read while the whole board fits on screen. Some games let you scroll or zoom the board; most simply scale it to the window, which is why a fine cut on a small laptop screen becomes a squint.

On a phone the coarse cuts are pleasant and the fine cuts are fiddly — a piece under a fingertip is a piece you cannot see. A tablet is the sweet spot for the genre, and a phone in landscape is the workable compromise. Progress is the one thing to check before starting a long puzzle: some titles remember a half-finished board on the device and others start over when the tab closes, so a large cut is best finished in one sitting unless the game says otherwise.

What the pictures are

The subjects are as broad as stock photography and cartoon art allow. Cats, dogs, horses and wildlife are the largest group and overlap heavily with the animal games hub; cars, trucks and motorcycles are next, sharing their pictures with the car games shelf; then come cartoon heroes, princesses and dolls for the girls games audience, dinosaurs for the dinosaur games crowd, and seasonal sets — snow scenes and tree ornaments around Christmas, pumpkins in October. Landscapes, cities and food fill in the rest for adults.

Two neighbors are often mistaken for jigsaws and are filed elsewhere. Sliding-tile puzzles, where one gap lets you shuffle squares around a frame, sit with the block puzzle games; pair-matching card grids are under memory games. If the box has loose pieces and a picture to build, it is here.

Categories:AnimalCarGirlsChristmasMemory