Jigsaw Speed Tips: Reading the Picture and Working the Tray

Updated October 2026

Jigsaw is a race through three puzzles in a row: a 3 by 3, a 4 by 4 and a 5 by 5, fifty pieces in total, all timed on a single clock. Each picture is a landscape painted fresh for every round, so you cannot memorise one image and repeat it. What you can learn is how those landscapes are built, how the tray hands out pieces, and how close a piece has to be before it locks. This guide covers all three, so you spend your time placing pieces instead of searching for them.

How the timer and score work

The clock does not start when the page opens or when you press Start. It starts the first time you touch a piece, and from then on it runs continuously through all three rounds, including the short pause of about 0.7 seconds between one completed picture and the next. It stops the instant the last piece of the 5 by 5 locks in. Your score is that total time, shown to a tenth of a second, and lower is better.

The clock measures real time. Switching to another app does not pause it, so if you are interrupted the run is effectively over. Start a run only when you can finish it in one sitting.

Rotating the phone or resizing the window during a round is safe. The game redraws the same painting and the same pieces at the new size, every piece you have already placed stays in its slot, and the clock simply keeps running. Only a piece you are holding at that moment drops back into the tray.

The tray only shows six pieces

Every round shuffles its pieces into a random order, and the tray below the board shows only the first six of them that are still unplaced. When you lock one in, the next piece in the queue slides into the tray. You cannot browse the rest, so classic advice like "find all the corners first" does not really apply: you work with whatever six pieces you have been dealt.

This changes how you should scan. Instead of looking at the board and asking which piece belongs there, look at the six pieces and pick the one you can place most confidently. A piece you are unsure about can stay in the tray while you place the easy ones, because each placement brings a new candidate forward. On the 3 by 3 the tray holds six of nine pieces, so most of the puzzle is visible at once. On the 5 by 5 it holds six of twenty five, and picking the easiest of the six becomes the main skill.

Pieces are shown smaller in the tray. The moment you pick one up it grows to its true board size, which makes it much easier to compare against the faint picture underneath.

How close you need to be

A piece only locks into its own slot. When you release it, the game measures how far it is from that slot, and if the distance is within 55 percent of one cell width it snaps into place. Anywhere else, it slides back into the tray with no penalty other than the time spent.

That tolerance is generous, and it gets more generous in absolute terms on smaller grids, because the cells are bigger. You do not need to line up the knobs and holes precisely. Aim for the middle of the right cell and let go. Spending extra time nudging a piece into perfect alignment is wasted effort.

Because a wrong drop costs nothing but time, a quick test drop is a reasonable choice when you have narrowed a piece down to two neighbouring cells. Try the more likely one first.

How the landscapes are painted

Every picture is drawn from the same recipe, using one of six colour palettes. Knowing the recipe tells you where things can appear.

• Sky: a vertical gradient that fills the top of the picture, sometimes with a scatter of small stars in the upper half.
• Sun or moon: a bright disc with a soft glow, placed somewhere in the middle three fifths of the width and in the upper part of the sky.
• Birds: five small curved strokes in the upper sky area.
• Hills: three layered ridges, each a different shade, starting around the middle of the picture, with the nearest ridge filling the bottom.
• Trees: two rows of small pointed trees near the bottom, one in the hill colour and one almost black.
• Waterline: the strip below the tree rows, about the lowest seventh of the picture, carries a stack of bright reflection strokes directly under the sun, faint horizontal ripple lines, and one small dark sailing boat.

This tells you a lot. A piece showing bright reflection strokes belongs in the bottom row, directly below the sun. A piece with part of the sun or its glow belongs in the upper rows. A piece containing the boat belongs in the bottom row. A piece of plain gradient sky is the hardest to place, because many pieces look alike.

Using the shapes

Each piece has four sides. Sides on the outside of the picture are perfectly flat, and inside sides have either a knob or a matching hole. That gives you a free filter: a piece with two flat sides is a corner, with one flat side it is on an edge, and with none it is an interior piece. The flat sides also tell you which edge, so a corner with flat top and left sides can only go in the top left cell.

Combine shape with colour. A plain sky piece is hard to place on colour alone, but if it has a flat top edge you know it belongs in the top row, and the gradient tells you roughly how far across. Even an edge piece of pure sky can usually be narrowed to two or three cells this way.

Pacing across three rounds

The three rounds have very different weights. The 3 by 3 has nine large pieces and most of them are in the tray at once, so it should take only seconds. The 5 by 5 has twenty five small pieces and will take most of your time. That means the big round is where a run is won. A smooth opening is still worth having, but steady work on the last round matters more than a few tenths saved on the first.

1. Touch a piece only when you are ready, because that starts the clock.
2. Scan all six tray pieces and place the most obvious one first: sun pieces, reflection pieces, the boat and corners.
3. Use the faint picture on the board to find the rough area, then drop near the centre of the cell.
4. Leave plain sky pieces until late in the round, when there are only a few empty cells left for them.
5. Keep the app in front until the final piece locks.

Your best time is saved on your device, and every completed run can be sent to the Hall of Fame from the Picture complete! card.