Welcome to the World Jigsaw Championships or WJCC for short. You join me at an exciting stage, as reigning champion Tim O’Hare prepares to defend his long-held title against all-comers. Will he manage to maintain the kind of jigsawing performance that we have seen so many times over recent years or will he slip up in his title defence and leave open a space for some other jigsaw nut to step in and finish things off? With commentary from a voice inside my head, backed up by expert analysis from another voice inside my head, coverage will resume just as soon as our champion gives the signal for what he hopes will be another display of supreme jigsawing – smooth and error-free, right the way through to the placement of that all-important final piece…

Downstairs, on the dining room table, sits an unfinished 1000-piece jigsaw that I have been working on for a week or so. Titled ‘Tropical Impressions’, it is a painting of a section of tropical rainforest complete with a couple of leopards, a couple of orangutans, a black panther, various butterflies, assorted lizards, a snake (don’t mention the snake), some rocks, quite a lot of waterfalls and pools and lots and lots of green foliage of various shades and forms. It’s a difficult jigsaw, partly because almost any 1000 piece jigsaw presents a decent challenge and partly because quite a large proportion of this particular picture is fairly uniform in tone and texture. It has been a good challenge, and now it lies waiting for the last couple of pushes towards completion, including the final one where the rules of the WJCC kick in.

I have always liked doing jigsaws. They seem to provide a kind of safe space that I can lose myself in so that despite the almost inevitable back or neck ache that results – for it seems to be impossible to find a comfortable way to sit or kneel such that you can get close enough to actually see the unplaced pieces nestling together in the box, the picture on the box lid and the jigsaw itself, let alone be able to reach and place pieces easily – I enter that state which is commonly referred to as ‘flow’. As a child I could regularly be found kneeling on the living room carpet, burning out my knees, body hunched over the box and the board and those intriguingly shaped little pieces of card. Sometimes I would be tackling an old favourite – one of my own puzzles, probably a present for a birthday or Christmas. Sometimes I would be tackling one of the ‘grown-ups’ puzzles that lived in a rickety drawer and always seemed to hold the special mystique of showing a place or picture that I knew nothing about and of being so much more complex to complete than my own supply.

The first jigsaws I can remember doing were some wood puzzles, maybe 8 by 10 inches in size, fashioned so that the wildly irregular-shaped pieces dropped into a space within a wooden surround. One puzzle was of a chicken, another was of an engine and a third (which was entirely mine and never shared with my brother and sister) showed a children’s television character called Joe who lived with his mother in a transport café. At the age of about 5 (so in 1970) Joe was one of my absolute favourites but I’ve never come across anyone else who really remembers him with the same fondness that I do. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who remembers him at all. Poor Joe. Those wooden jigsaws were done over and over again, turning the base to scatter the pieces out onto the floor or table with a satisfying clatter before racing to pop them back into place again. They were not difficult; or at least they became not difficult by the time I remember them from.

Next came four card jigsaws showing scenes from the Australian television series ‘Skippy’. I had quite a lot of Skippy things, sent by my father’s family who had all moved down under in the 1950s. Skippy the bush kangaroo was a hero, saving unfortunate people from all kinds of trouble and scrapes via a combination of his incredible danger-detecting sixth sense and ability to communicate exact details – casualty numbers, locations, injuries – to his human handlers with a crafty tap-tap-tap of his paw and his snuffley squeaks and clicks. My Skippy jigsaws were built in the same fashion as the wood puzzles already described, a thick cardboard base with a raised edge forming a tray into which the card pieces were placed to form the picture. There were no tabs or matching cut-outs in the pieces, just wavy, irregular edges created by a series of random curving cuts across the picture. One of the puzzles was a full-body shot of Skippy. I think another showed a child laying incapacitated on the sandy outback ground with a broken leg whilst, horror upon horrors, a snake sidled over ready to strike and unload its lethal cargo of venom. Why did I mention the snake? It makes me shiver to this day. I did not like placing those particular pieces.

The most memorable jigsaws from my youth were the ones that formed the complete set of Jigmaps that I acquired over time. Let me see: Great Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, North America, South America, Africa and India. Thinking back it seems odd that there was no Jigmap of Europe but I am sure that one never existed. I loved my Jigmaps. They had a good number of pieces and so posed a decent challenge but one that could be completed in a few sessions. They had great pictures showing important landscape features, famous buildings, important cultural sights and so I learned much from them. They had small slot shapes cut out of the picture into which you could place either a piece that completed the picture or a white piece that displayed the name of the city or key town that was at that position (there were perhaps a dozen such tabs for each Jigmap). I loved the way that the jigsaws were the shape of the area shown, a bright blue edge of varying thickness representing the ocean boundary around each landmass or a set of thin coloured layers like a geological section marking any continental land edges. My absolute favourite was the Jigmap of Scandinavia, featuring the bold, distinctive flags of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. For some time, at around the age of about 10 I really wanted to live in Sweden when I grew up, and now I struggle to think of any other reason than that I loved that particular jigsaw so much… so much, in fact, that when one of the edge pieces at the very top-right of the picture, part of the land border between Finland and Russia went missing, my father made a replacement, carefully painting in the lines and colours to match those around it. The Great Britain Jigmap featured places like Land’s End, Stonehenge, the Forth rail bridge and the Giant’s Causeway and these places with their artistic representations, along with all the similar ones on all the other Jigmaps, became so familiar to me as I completed them so many times – that familiarity enhancing, not lessening, my enjoyment. Those Jigmaps remained with me for several decades and I regret that pressure to de-clutter and save space when we last moved house means that I no longer have them. Of course, these days, the power of the online marketplace is such that I am sure that I could rebuild my collection if I really wanted to. But perhaps it is best to have let them go – I might have a sudden urge to move to Stockholm, Wellington or perhaps even Woomera.

Two other memorable puzzles from around the same time were a pair of round puzzles, probably with 500 pieces each. One was mine and showed different types of birds and the other was my older brother’s and showed scenes from different battles in British history. I really liked the battles one although I cannot remember much of the picture; just, for some unknown reason, a vague memory that there was something to do with Marlborough so I guess that was the Battle of Blenheim. I’d love to see that picture again. I loved the different uniforms and piecing each one together in turn was a really satisfying way to pass the time.

Through my teens, for an occasional real challenge I would tackle one of the grown-up puzzles and also began to enjoy puzzles showing a photograph of some place or another – a watermill or some such (reflections in water always add a certain challenge to a jigsaw). The absolute classic puzzle in our household was a 1000 piece one showing the Chateau du Chambord given to us by a French teacher who was staying with us during a school exchange. For me, at that time, that puzzle was wickedly difficult. At the bottom of the picture there was solid green lawn – just the same colour grass right the way across. Above that was the chateau itself – uniform stone work dotted with so many doors, windows and turrets all alike and yet not alike so that you could never quite tell which window, which door or which turret the piece you were holding belonged to. There were two large trees on either side, their dark trunks running straight up through the green lawn and chateau façade before finally filling the space above the chateau roof with a tangle of brown and green branches and foliage. That was one difficult puzzle, but I cracked it quite a few times, even after one single piece went missing (because once a piece goes missing you never really get the full satisfaction of successful completion).

There were other puzzles over the years: scenes of harbours, humorous cartoons of the inside of a factory and a Winter Olympics scene with hundreds of little people, all similarly clothed, running about doing quirky things, and an evil one of dice – lots and lots of dice, almost all white ones with black dots on with just a few coloured ones thrown in to give the jigsaw puzzler something to get started with. Most of these puzzles would have been Christmas presents from a relative – giving a once-in-a-year impulse to my jigsawing activities. I had one showing the constellations of the night sky and a huge 2000 piece one showing the same constellations but from an ancient star map. I have neither of those two anymore and regret this greatly. All I have now* are one of the navigational chart of Plymouth Sound, one of National Trust properties and landscapes, one of St Pancras Station and one of British birds but there are assorted others in the loft passed on for my daughter to do by a family friend.

It is one of these recently acquired hand-me-downs, the aforementioned ‘Tropical Inspirations’, that currently sits on the dining room table waiting for the last 200 or so pieces to snap into place. I went into battle with it about a week ago deploying my tried and trusted technique. First, there is the stage of going through the box, piece by piece, picking out the edge and corner pieces. Once these are separated I assemble the entire edge of the puzzle, usually finding, much to my annoyance, that there are two or three or four edge pieces still hiding in the box. Then it is on to the interior. Always my strategy is to look for a distinctively coloured part of the pattern and pick out any pieces that seem to be the right shade to fit. Sometimes, in a fit of boldness, three or four such elements are sorted in parallel. For ‘Tropical Inspirations’ the leopards came first, with the smaller orangutans tagging along at the same time, before a fairly lengthy trawl through various sections of rock and waterfall and distinctively coloured and shaded tree trunks and foliage. Eventually all the different sub-elements start to click together and the picture becomes more whole than holes. At that point, my mind starts to race forwards to the excitement of the WJCC that lies ahead. That is where I am with Tropical Inspirations, just on the cusp of giving the signal and taking on the ultimate challenge.

The penultimate stage, in which the excitement of the upcoming challenge of the WJCC builds steadily, involves placing individual pieces whilst gradually smoothing out all of those that remain in the box so that they form a single layer, all picture side up, all visible together. For a typical 1000 piece jigsaw the result is around 150 unplaced pieces (yes, I’ve counted them) requiring no turning and no sifting to see their shape and pattern. Then there is usually a pause… because to go further is to start the game; and once started it’s an all or nothing challenge to the finish. To pick up a single piece from that magic layer is to send the signal that the WJCC has begun; to trigger the internal commentary and to dare to lose the ultimate accolade of Jigsaw Completion Champion of the World.

The rules of the WJCC are simple. From the point where there is a single layer of puzzle pieces sitting in the box, picture side up, all in view together, any piece that is lifted from the box must be placed correctly. Failure to do so, either putting a piece back down or trying to place it in an incorrect position, breaks the streak and hands the possibility of victory to the fictitious opponent. Sometimes it can be a close run thing – the hand moves to place a piece wrongly but at the last moment there is a hesitation, a turn, a withdrawal, a re-think. The commentary team viewing the jigsaw puzzler from their external vantage point and whose words are bouncing around inside my head, may question whether he has blown his attempt; whether he should have picked an easier piece; whether this is finally the occasion on which his mantle of victory will fall. There is discussion of whether he should have gone further before sending the signal that the competition had begun; whether a mistake at this point will enable the opponent to intervene and race away to the finish or whether a further mistake by that unknown adversary will hand the initiative back to him again. Then there is a flash of inspiration, a swerve of the hand and the piece slots in somewhere else. The commentators gasp at the audacity and talk about how he always comes through in the end and that there really is no-one else who can touch his level.

As an added complication, one that ratchets the tension up a notch, I may switch into a mode where missing pieces must be found and placed in sequence, working up in rows from the bottom or across in columns from the right-hand edge. Then the tension becomes palpable, for the player at least.

But mistakes are sometimes made; pieces are sometimes wrongly identified or painfully misplaced. Then it is time for the invocation of special rules. A minor error, perhaps a piece just required 90 or 180 degree rotation to fill a void is excused by the commentators as “a brilliant recovery”. A major misdemeanour such as complete misidentification and failure to place a piece at all is saved because “he’s really on thin ice now – that counts for one of his two or three (or perhaps even four…) major mistakes allowed by the newly introduced protocol agreed last week by the WJCC Board”. Catastrophic failure – just too many mistakes to wriggle away from – rapidly results in the initiative being returned as “it’s unbelievable – the opponent has been waiting and watching all this time for just such an opening only to blow it at the first opportunity”.

In this final phase, as pieces steadily transfer from box to constructed jigsaw, play becomes easier and easier and ultimately the last ten to twenty pieces are slotted in via a rapid and triumphant series of moves. “And there it is. He’s done it. Really – was there ever any doubt?”

The beauty of a jigsaw, is that it is so much more than a box of pieces that fit together to make a picture – at least it can be if you choose to make it so. The additional constraints, self-imposed and supported by the imagined drama of internal dialogue, serve to ensure that the level of challenge is exquisitely calibrated so that jigsaw puzzling is not simply a process of building a picture from a thousand pieces, it is a guaranteed path into ‘flow’, that marvellous state where the difficulty of a task is perfectly matched to the level of skill possessed. You can try it for yourself. You can even enter the World Jigsaw Completion Championships. But you will never, ever take my title from me.

(c) Tim O’Hare, January 2024 (originally written in 2021)

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* My collection has expanded considerably since this piece was originally written a couple of years ago.