The Complete Guide to Jumbo Puzzles

Most people who own a Jumbo puzzle have no idea they own one. They own a Wasgij, or a Jan van Haasteren, or a Falcon. The company behind all three has been going since 1853, still cuts its own board in its own factory, and is the most quietly influential name in the category.

A publisher, not a house style

Every other brand guide we have written describes a house style. Gibsons does British nostalgia. Cobble Hill does warm North American cottage scenes. HEYE does loud cartoon panoramas.

Jumbo does not work like that, and if you approach it expecting a house style you will buy the wrong box.

Jumbo is a publisher. It runs four ranges that share a factory and share nothing else. A Jan van Haasteren and a Falcon de luxe sit at opposite ends of the room from each other: one is a shouting comic disaster, the other is a quiet watercolour of a harbour at low tide. Both say Jumbo somewhere on the packaging.

So the useful question is never "should I buy a Jumbo". It is "which of the four".

Where the company came from

The company traces back to a mid-nineteenth-century partnership between Engelbert Hausemann, who owned an Amsterdam department store, and Wilhelm Hotte. Hausemann & Hotte imported games and puzzles into the Netherlands. The date the company itself claims is 1853, which makes it one of the oldest game companies still operating anywhere.

Two decisions turned it from an importer into a manufacturer, and both still matter to what arrives on your table.

1. 1950: it built its own cardboard factory. De Nederlandse Spellenfabriek meant Jumbo was no longer dependent on anyone else's board.
2. 1967: it stopped importing altogether. The company dropped other people's products and committed entirely to its own brand, moving production to Wognum.

That is the fact worth carrying away. Jumbo makes its own puzzles, in its own factory, in the Netherlands. A great many puzzle brands are now design and licensing operations that contract the physical manufacture out, which is precisely why cut quality varies so much between titles from the same name. Jumbo owning the line is the reason a Wasgij and a Falcon feel like relatives despite looking nothing alike.

The four ranges, and how to tell them apart

Two of those have their own full guides, because they earn them: The Complete Guide to Wasgij and The Complete Guide to Falcon de Luxe.

Jan van Haasteren, and what it is like to build one

Jan van Haasteren was born in Schiedam in February 1936 and had a full career as a Dutch comic artist and illustrator before he ever drew a jigsaw. He started drawing for Jumbo in 1980. At first the company simply reused existing advertising artwork; as the puzzles sold, he began drawing images specifically for them.

In 2003 he signed a lifetime contract with Jumbo, which is when Jan van Haasteren stopped being an artist Jumbo used and became a brand in its own right, with its own logo and its own conventions: recurring family members, and a set of hidden elements that regular buyers hunt for in every single title.

He is now in his late eighties, and the company has been open about what that means. Studio Jan van Haasteren was created in 2013, bringing in the illustrators Dick Heins and Rob Derks so the range could continue. New titles still appear, and van Haasteren himself still contributes a small number of original images a year.

We think the succession is worth knowing rather than glossing over. If you are collecting the range, the artist of a given title is a real question.

What building one is actually like

This is where the honest warning goes, because Jan van Haasteren puzzles are the ones we most often see bought for the wrong person.

The difficulty does not come from the piece count. It comes from the fact that the colour is spread evenly across the entire image. A landscape gives you a sky, a lake, a field, three large calm regions you can clear in the first hour to build momentum. A van Haasteren gives you none. Every square centimetre is a different small catastrophe in a different set of primary colours.

The board, the fit and the box

Our view, stated plainly: Jumbo's board is good, not exceptional, and the fit is better than the board.

Pieces seat firmly and stay seated, which matters on a 1000 piece comic scene where you are constantly moving half-built sections around to find room. The cut is consistent, and false fits are uncommon.

Where it sits below Ravensburger and Gibsons is board thickness and the finish. A Jumbo piece flexes a little more between the fingers, and the surface is glossier, so it throws more glare under a single overhead lamp than a linen-finished Ravensburger does.

One thing Jumbo does better than almost anyone, and it is unglamorous: the boxes are generously sized. Pieces are not compressed, the lid does not bow, and a part-used box closes properly and stacks. Anyone who has fought a brand that packs 1000 pieces into a box built for 750 will know why that is worth a line.

The part nobody mentions: Jumbo makes the boards too

Jumbo is not only a puzzle publisher. Two of the most widely used accessory ranges in puzzling are theirs:

This is genuinely useful to know when you are choosing. The most common reason a puzzle never gets finished is that the dining table is needed for dinner, and it is slightly absurd that the company solving that problem is better known for a cartoon of a man falling into a swimming pool.

If you are working out whether you want a board or a mat, Puzzle Boards, Mats and Tables covers what each is for, what size suits each piece count, and why we deliberately do not sell puzzle tables.

Who it suits, and who it does not

Common questions