Advanced options
Pace is NOT linear with size: doubling the pieces more than doubles the time (more piece-hunting per placement), and single-colour skies grind everyone to a crawl. The rates here suit a typical landscape/scene puzzle. Edges first, sort by colour into trays, good light: the three habits that beat any natural talent.
What The Jigsaw Time Calculator Works Out
- Total solving time: pieces divided by your pace in pieces per hour. A steady solver places about 100 an hour on a typical scenic puzzle, relaxed table-visitors nearer 60, the practised 150 plus, so the standard 1,000-piece is a 10-hour project.
- At your session length: total hours divided by the length of an evening sitting, rounded up. Ten hours in 1.5-hour evenings is seven sessions, which is why the board or mat the puzzle lives on matters: the dining table has other constituencies.
- Pace check: the typical range for comparison. A 1,000-piece takes 8-15 hours across a week or two; a 5,000-piece is a season, not a weekend.
- Custom piece count (advanced): any size from a 20-piece children's puzzle to a 40,000-piece monster, overriding the dropdown.
- Image difficulty (advanced): a multiplier on the time. Busy scenes with distinct detail solve faster; big skies, uniform sea and repeating patterns slow everyone; gradient and single-colour puzzles are pure piece-shape reasoning at roughly double the time.
- Bigger puzzles slower per piece (advanced): each placement in a bigger puzzle means a hunt through a bigger remainder, so the per-piece rate falls. Switching this on scales the time by (pieces / 1,000) to the power 0.3, which makes a 2,000-piece about 2.5 times a 1,000-piece rather than twice.
- People at the table (advanced): extra puzzlers help with diminishing returns (two people are about 1.7 times as fast, four about 2.8 times) because they get in each other's way and chase the same pieces. The effective pace card shows the combined table rate.
- Sessions per week and calendar time (advanced): how many evenings a week you actually sit down, turned into the weeks or months the puzzle will occupy the table.
- Cost per hour of entertainment (advanced): the puzzle price divided by total person-hours. A GBP 15 puzzle giving 10 hours is GBP 1.50 an hour, which beats nearly any rival leisure line; charity-shop puzzles at GBP 2 to GBP 4 bring it to pence, with the missing-piece lottery priced in.