I’ve loved jigsaw puzzles ever since I was a little girl and would help my mom put them together. She didn’t pull one out that often, so it always felt special. I didn’t fully appreciate until I had kids of my own how challenging it can be to have a large jigsaw puzzle sitting out for an extended period of time. (Especially if you want to have all of the pieces on hand to be able to complete the puzzle!)

Gameplay Overview

Several years ago I discovered the website jigidi.com, and it was a game changer for me. Jigidi.com has a nice clean interface that lets you drag and drop pieces around the workspace and plays a satisfying click when you connect the pieces together. The pieces are all in their final orientation throughout, so you don’t have to use extra actions to rotate pieces. (I’ve encountered this in some other jigsaw puzzle games, and while it adds an interesting level of complexity, it’s hard on my hands and I tend to move away from those clients fairly quickly.)

Players can change the background to a handful of neutral colors, which can be used to highlight piece shapes or to see smaller details on the pieces to assist with matching. There have been a few puzzles I’ve solved with palettes that made me wish for just a couple more options in the background choices, but overall the provided colors have served me well.

Plentiful Puzzles and Community

One of the other reasons I prefer Jigidi.com over other jigsaw puzzle games I’ve played is that it is also a community. Members of the community are able to upload images of their choice. Jigidi.com converts the uploaded images into jigsaw puzzles for the rest of the community to solve. This leads to an amazing variety of puzzle art styles that grows daily. You can follow community members that share puzzles you enjoy. There is an notification area of the user panel once that alerts you when someone you follow has added a new puzzle.

Finish Puzzles Now… or Later

In addition to notifications, when you are logged in you can continue puzzles in progress. You can have multiple puzzles in this section. The site picks up exactly where you left off when you open it again. You can also add several puzzles to finish later when browsing through the puzzle collection.

There are filters for content types as well as difficulty level (number of pieces). There is also an adult content filter in your user settings that you can turn off if you would like to solve puzzles of an adult nature. (I can’t really speak to this feature as I disabled it only briefly for the purposes of writing this review. I can confirm that there is indeed adult nature artwork that is viewable if you turn this filter off in your profile.)

Timer Option vs Zen Mode

For those who like to try to solve puzzles quickly, there is a timer available. You can see how long it takes you to solve a puzzle, or you can turn off the timer with ‘zen mode’. When you are using the timer you can compare your solve time with others on the leaderboard once you are finished. I tend to use the timer more for gauging how much time I’ve spent in a given session, but I don’t concern myself with my solve speed.

There are small ads that show in the lower corner of the info panel while you are solving a puzzle. They do offer the option to get Jigidi Plus to have ads-free puzzle solving and support the site for 18USD/year. You can also gift the Jigidi Plus option to others, which I thought was a nice option to offer.

Shiny things:

• Wide variety of puzzles to choose from
• Choose your difficulty level
• Easy to use puzzle creator
• Save your progress
• Timer or Zen modes
• Jigidi Plus available to remove ads

Not So shiny things:

• Maybe a few more background shades to choose from, but that’s very minor
• Small ads present when playing in free mode

Overall, I highly recommend Jigidi.com to anyone who loves jigsaw puzzles. It’s a great way to solve puzzles online, and a chance to engage with other puzzle lovers in the website’s community.