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The Complete Guide to Cloudberries Puzzles
The short answer
Cloudberries is a British puzzle company making 1000 piece puzzles for adults, built around bold graphic design rather than traditional scenery. Its images are typically colour-led compositions, shells, pixels, geometric patterns, rather than landscapes or cottages. The board is unusually thick with a low-glare finish, the puzzles are made in Europe on FSC-certified paper, and the company has planted a tree for every puzzle sold since January 2020. It is the right brand for someone who cares what the finished puzzle looks like on the table, and the wrong one for someone who wants an easy evening.
Almost every puzzle brand sells you a place. Cloudberries sells you a composition. Shells graded from cream to deep coral, a wall of hands, pixels, pure geometry. It is the most design-led brand we carry and the one most likely to end up framed.
Cloudberries at a glance
- From
- The United Kingdom
- Made in
- Europe, on FSC-certified paper and board
- Core format
- 1000 pieces
- House style
- Bold, graphic, colour-led. Modern rather than nostalgic
- Board
- Notably thick, matte, low-glare
- Since January 2020
- A tree planted for every puzzle sold
- Claim to a first
- The world's first crowd-sourced jigsaw puzzle
- Best for
- Experienced puzzlers, and anyone who intends to frame it
On this page
What actually makes it different
The jigsaw market is overwhelmingly nostalgic. Cottages, harbours, steam trains, cats in libraries, village high streets in the snow. There are excellent brands doing that and we stock most of them.
Cloudberries is doing something else. The images are designed rather than depicted: flat colour, repetition, pattern, arrangement. A Cloudberries puzzle of shells is not a photograph of a beach, it is a hundred shells laid out and graded by colour across the frame. The subject is the arrangement.
That single decision changes three things at once: what the finished puzzle looks like on a wall, how hard it is to build, and who should buy it. It is worth taking each in turn, because the brand is very easy to buy for the wrong person.
Why these are harder than the count suggests
Here is the thing most puzzle marketing avoids saying: piece count is a poor measure of difficulty. What actually decides how long a puzzle takes is how much information each piece carries.
A landscape hands you enormous amounts of information. This piece is sky, that one is roof, this is the edge of a lake. You can sort into meaningful piles in the first ten minutes and each pile shrinks visibly.
A colour-graded composition hands you very little. Every piece is a fragment of a smooth transition between two similar tones. You cannot sort by subject, because there is no subject. You sort by shade, and shade is a continuum, so your piles are arbitrary and they do not shrink in a satisfying way.
| What you are building | Where the difficulty comes from |
|---|---|
| Graded colour fields, e.g. shells, waves | Almost no landmarks. Progress feels slow for the first half, then accelerates hard |
| Repeating pattern, e.g. pixels, geometry | Shape and colour repeat, so a piece can look correct in several places |
| Dense object collections, e.g. pantry, hands | The easiest Cloudberries images, because every object is its own landmark |
How to build one without hating it. Do the edge, then resist the urge to sort into three big piles. Sort narrowly, into eight or ten shade groups, and accept that the first hour will feel unproductive. Colour-led puzzles are back-loaded: the last 300 pieces go four times faster than the first 300, because by then you are placing into a shrinking hole rather than searching an open field. People who give up on this brand almost always give up in the first third.
There is more on why difficulty and piece count are not the same thing in The Complete Guide to Puzzle Piece Counts.
The board, and why matte matters here specifically
Two physical things stand out, and one of them is more important for this brand than for any other we carry.
The board is thick. A piece holds its shape between the fingers rather than flexing, and a built section can be slid across a board without buckling in the middle. On a puzzle you may well want to glue and hang, that rigidity is doing real work.
The finish is matte, and on Cloudberries specifically that is not a nice-to-have. Glare is worst over large areas of flat, saturated colour, which is exactly what this brand is made of. A glossy finish across a solid field of teal under a single overhead downlight will bounce the light straight back and hide the tonal differences you are trying to read. The low-glare surface is arguably the single most important specification decision the brand has made.
Stated as feel, not as measurement. We describe board thickness by how it behaves at the table, because we have not measured it and will not publish numbers we have not taken. We are building a proper dataset of difficulty and build times from our own customers, and when there is enough of it to stand behind, pages like this one get real figures instead of considered opinion.
A company that experiments
Most puzzle brands are catalogues. Cloudberries behaves more like a design studio, and two projects show it.
It created what it calls the world's first crowd-sourced jigsaw puzzle, handing the design decisions to a large group of people rather than to one artist. Co-founder Steve Vickers framed it as a test of the wisdom of the crowd, the idea that a large group innovates and designs better than an individual expert. Whether or not you buy the theory, it is a strange and interesting thing for a puzzle company to spend money proving.
It has also made puzzle box sets built as a triptych, three puzzles that tell a story in sequence, and has run collaborations well outside the usual puzzle territory, including a limited edition marking Wikipedia's 25th anniversary.
We mention this because it is the clearest signal of what you are buying. This is a brand that treats a jigsaw as a design object with an idea in it. If that sounds like marketing to you, it is fair to say the ideas are more interesting than the average brand's, and also fair to say you can safely ignore all of it and just buy the one with the nice shells on it.
Which one to start with
Easiest way in
Object collections
Titles built from lots of distinct things, a pantry, a wall of hands, are the gentlest Cloudberries, because every object gives you a landmark to work from.
The signature
Graded colour
Shells, waves, blooms. This is the brand doing what it is actually for, and the one most worth framing. Not a first puzzle.
The hard end
Pattern and geometry
Pixels and geometric work are the real test, because shape repeats as well as colour. Buy this one when you want to be beaten up a bit.
If in doubt
Buy for the wall
These are the puzzles in our range most likely to be glued and hung, so buy the image you would genuinely put up rather than the one that sounds hardest.
If you do intend to keep it, How to Glue a Jigsaw Puzzle covers the method and the two mistakes that warp a puzzle permanently.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Strong fit
Bored of landscapes
The classic Cloudberries customer is someone who has done a great many puzzles and wants difficulty from the image rather than from another thousand pieces.
Strong fit
Design-minded homes
This is the brand for the person whose walls you already admire. A framed Cloudberries reads as a print, not as a novelty.
Strong fit
Gifting a modern household
If a cottage-and-cats puzzle would feel wrong in their front room, this is the answer.
Look elsewhere
Beginners and comfort puzzlers
Genuinely not the place to start. For a first puzzle in years, or a relaxed evening, take a Gibsons or a Cobble Hill scene instead.
Our Cloudberries range
Shop Cloudberries
The graded-colour signature titles, the pattern work and the object collections, all 1000 pieces. Everything listed is stock we physically hold in Sydney, so if it is on the page we can send it today.
Related reading
- The Complete Guide to Puzzle Piece Counts, why the number on the box is not the difficulty
- The Best Jigsaw Puzzles in Australia, the four things worth being firm about
- How to Glue a Jigsaw Puzzle, because this is the brand you will want to keep
- The Complete Guide to Thames & Hudson Puzzles, the other design-led name we carry
- The Puzzle Library, everything we have written
Common questions
Are Cloudberries puzzles hard?
Harder than the piece count suggests, and for a specific reason. Difficulty in a jigsaw comes far more from colour variation than from the number of pieces, and Cloudberries builds images out of large fields of graded, closely-related colour. A puzzle of shells arranged by shade gives you very few landmarks and a lot of pieces that look almost identical. That is the appeal for experienced puzzlers and the trap for beginners. - q: What makes the Cloudberries board different? a: > Two things you notice immediately: it is thick, and it is matte. Thick board means a piece holds its shape rather than flexing, and the assembled puzzle can be moved without buckling. The low-glare finish matters more than people expect on this brand specifically, because the images use large areas of flat saturated colour, and a glossy finish over flat colour is exactly where overhead light bounces straight back at you. - q: Where are Cloudberries puzzles made? a: > The company is British and the puzzles are manufactured in Europe using sustainably sourced, FSC-certified paper and board. Since January 2020 the company has committed to planting a tree for every puzzle sold. - q: What is the crowd-sourced Cloudberries puzzle? a: > Cloudberries created what it describes as the world's first crowd-sourced jigsaw puzzle, designed by asking large numbers of people to make the design decisions rather than handing them to one artist. The idea being tested was the wisdom of the crowd, that a large group makes better collective design choices than an individual expert. It is a genuinely unusual thing for a puzzle company to attempt, and it tells you what kind of company it is. - q: Is Cloudberries good for a beginner? a: > Generally no, and we would rather say so. The colour-led images are unforgiving if you have not built many puzzles, and the experience of spending an hour on one patch of near-identical blue is how people decide they do not like puzzles. Start someone on a scene with structure in it, then bring them here once they want a real test. - q: Who is Cloudberries actually for? a: > Two groups. People who care how the finished thing looks, because these are the puzzles most worth gluing and hanging. And experienced puzzlers who have grown bored of landscapes and want difficulty that comes from the image rather than from adding another thousand pieces.
Sources and further reading
- Cloudberries, British company making puzzles for adults, European manufacture, sustainably sourced paper and board, tree planted per puzzle from January 2020
- Cloudberries co-founder Steve Vickers on the crowd-sourced puzzle and the wisdom of the crowd
- Cloudberries product range, piece counts and current titles
- Titles and formats verified against our own live catalogue, August 2026
- Board feel, glare and relative difficulty are our own experience and puzzler consensus, not measurement
Last reviewed and updated 12 August 2026 by Michael, Owner, Premium Puzzles. We keep this page current as the range and the market change, rather than letting it age as a dated post.
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