What is speed puzzling?
Speed puzzling takes the usually relaxing pastime of jigsaw puzzling and elevates it to an entertaining and exciting sport, as participants race against the clock and others!
At national and international speed puzzling competitions, participants typically solve a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle within 90 minutes. The best speed puzzlers can assemble 500 pieces in around 30 minutes!
It’s normal that participants new to this activity will take two hours or more for harder puzzles, but the great thing is that regardless of your previous experience, speed puzzling has many benefits, and progress will easily show after a few weeks of training.
- Enjoy assembling a range of puzzles with beautiful, inspiring and challenging images.
- Improve your personal best time and have fun racing against others.
- Improve your hand and eye coordination.
- Improve finger dexterity.
- Improve your colour, pattern and detail recognition ability.
- Improve your shape sorting skills.
- Meet other puzzle lovers from the friendly puzzle community!
- Break out a sweat! Solving a jigsaw puzzle under 90 minutes burns many calories ;)
In addition to solo events, there are competitions for pairs and teams. There are even non-stop puzzling events over 12 or 24 hour periods! Check out our events page for jigsaw contests near you.
The upcoming World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship in Vallodolid, Spain, is the largest speed puzzling competition and will take place on September 17-22, 2024. There is no pre-qualification necessary, and anyone who can get themselves to Vallodolid can enter. Registrations receive a 20% discount before 1st June.
How do I join the fun?
First of all, find puzzles that have been used in previous competitions and have confirmed results. You can filter products in our online shop, for example by “Competition / Individual”, to see currently available puzzles and their times. Each puzzle will have the fastest and median times. By clicking on the full results, you can see the names and times of all participants and get an idea of how difficult a puzzle is.
When you have received the puzzle, make sure to time yourself as you solve the puzzle and then compare your time with the results online. By building and speed running the puzzle a second and third time, you should see big jumps of improvements as you learn from the mistakes of the previous attempt and sharpen your building skills.
It’s good practice to try a variety of puzzles with different textures and colour tones. For example, a landscape photo with a section of sky, is very different to a colourful patterned illustration or a photo of animals.
If you’d like to connect with others, take a photo and share online on instagram with the hashtags #speedpuzzling and #jigsawpuzzle. By searching for these hashtags you’ll quickly find an entire community of puzzle lovers.
