Tips being coins and tricks being a magic trick to make a big coin.
How do I determine the difficulty of a jigsaw puzzle?
Last updated: Mid 2005
Type: Tip
Reliability: 
- Very high
Ease of learning: 
- Easy-medium
Time saving: 
- Doesn't apply
Usefulness: - Very useful
Difficulty: 
- Medium-hard
Overall: 
- Great
Jigsaw puzzles come in many sizes with many different pictures and types of pieces. From babyish 5-piece puzzles to monstrous 18,000 piece puzzles that fill 2/3 of an entire room, puzzles offer many challenges. Yet, surprising as it is, the number of pieces in the puzzle isn't the primary factor in puzzle difficulty, although it does play a moderate role. The image, itself, is the primary factor. This may seem strange, so I'll explain why. By the way, yes, the number of pieces in the puzzle does affect the difficulty.
Let's take three examples of pictures:
The first (top) image is usually what a jigsaw puzzle would be, in a sense. The middle image would be extremely easy to do. The bottom image would be very hard to do. Do you see why now? If you don't, here's the trick:
Pretend that each of these images was a 300-piece puzzle. A common way puzzles are put together is by breaking it up into sections. Take the top image as a guide. You have the sky, the text, the 3D text on the building, the dome-topped building, and all the other buildings. This puzzle can be broken up into these sections and be put together by finding pieces that relate to these sections and merge the sections later on. This is the easiest way to solve a jigsaw puzzle (or, at least, it's the method I use).
Now, let's go to the middle image. Why is this so easy? The same principal works, only you have a lot more sections to go by. I betcha that you could do such a puzzle in half the time you could in the first, if both puzzles were the same number of pieces. Just find all the white pieces, all the yellow, all the black, all the red and so on and merge them.
Now, why is the bottom image so hard? The reason why is because it is nearly impossible to break it up into variable sections so you have to put each piece in one by one.
The picture is the primary contributer to difficulty. It alone has 65% of the total impact. The number of pieces in the puzzle has 30% of the impact on the difficulty. Almost anyone should know that the more pieces the puzzle has, the harder it gets.
The remaining 5% of the difficulty is from the shapes of the pieces. Why does this have a factor? Let's consider some various puzzle pieces:
As seen here, there are three types of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Type A are the hardest to work with, but they offer the greatest stability holding the puzzle together better. You can easily lift puzzles made from these types of pieces off of the table without breaking them and even hold them in the air. Type B are easier to work with as you can match shapes better. Type C, the random type, are medium in difficulty. These come in all sorts of odd shapes and sizes. Sometimes they're really long and thin with one connector, other times they resemble type B.
Now, given the three images at the top, if the top image was 500 pieces, for equal difficulty, the middle puzzle would have to be about 1200 pieces and the bottom puzzle only 150 pieces.
You may have tried, seen, or heard of puzzles that are two-sided, of the same image, but with one side rotated 90 degrees. This nearly triples the difficulty.
The hardest possible puzzle would be one of 18,000 pieces (the world's largest puzzle), be a picture like the bottom image, have type A puzzle pieces, and be double-sided with a different mess on the other side. Who'd want to do such a puzzle anyway?
The easiest puzzles would use very few pieces, have a picture like the middle one above, have type B puzzle pieces, and be single-sided.
Footnotes:
* Whether this saves time is not really applicable to this specific trick.
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