Puzzles 200+ pieces

The long ones

Two hundred pieces and above, up to two hundred and fifty. These are not evening puzzles. They get laid out somewhere they can stay and are returned to over several days: from three hours to a weekend of shorter sittings, as a rough guide, with the painted round designs at the top of that range. If you have finished one of our smaller boards and want the next thing, this is it.

What do two hundred pieces mean on a board with no straight edges?

On a rectangular cardboard puzzle, difficulty rises roughly in step with the count. Here it does not, and the reason is that the usual strategy is unavailable from the start. There is no border to build. The outline follows the subject – an animal silhouette, a disc, a country – so the pieces that would be edges elsewhere are simply more pieces. On a large board that removes the one structure most people rely on to break the task into stages.

Where does the time actually go?

Sorting. On a two-hundred-piece board the initial sort takes longer than the first fifty placements, and how you sort determines everything after it. Colour works on the multicoloured designs. On the single-palette ones – a gorilla in green and blue, a canyon in red stone – sorting has to be done by line direction, pattern scale or the angle of the cut, and finding the right method is most of the puzzle.

What is in this range?

Our largest ornamental animals at two hundred pieces – the Blue Whale, the Howling Wolf, the Imperial Elephant, the Fiery Horse, the Lion Mozaik, the Tropical Turtle – with the Coral Oasis reef and the Peacock Garden disc beside them. The six photographic landscape discs, each just over two hundred. The King Gorilla at two hundred and fifteen, the largest board we cut at 42 × 39 cm. And at the top, the six round painted designs at two hundred and fifty pieces each, the highest count we make: the Storm Horse, the Golden Fox, the Forest Deer, the Celestial Dragon, the Koala Mandala and the Zen Cat.

Where should it live while you build it?

Worth thinking about before ordering. A board of this size wants a surface it can occupy for a few days: a spare table, a tray, a sheet of card that can be lifted and put away. Started on a dining table, it will have to move at dinner time, and moving a half-built puzzle with no border is how pieces get lost. Thick wooden pieces stay where you leave them, so a corner of a table the board can keep is all it needs between sittings. Not today? The 100 to 199 range is the collection's middle, and under 100 pieces is the children's end.