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Australia's Puzzle Institute
This is not a blog. It is a reference library about jigsaw puzzles, written for Australian puzzlers, and organised by what you are trying to find out rather than by whatever we happened to publish most recently.
Start here
If you read one thing, read the guide to piece counts. It is the decision that shapes every other choice you make about a puzzle.
The Complete Guide to Puzzle Piece Counts
What 500, 1000 and 2000 pieces really cost you in time and table space, why 636 exists, and the honest answer to whether more pieces means harder.
Cornerstone · 9 min read
The Complete Guide to Wasgij
The puzzle where the box image is never the picture you build. Every series ranked by difficulty, and whether to buy the Jumbo or the Holdson edition.
Cornerstone · 16 min read
The Complete Guide to Ravensburger Puzzles
The largest brand we carry and the benchmark for the rest. What Softclick means at the table, every series explained, and whether the premium is worth it.
Cornerstone · 13 min read
The Best Jigsaw Puzzles in Australia
The four things that separate a good puzzle from a cheap one, every premium brand judged on each of them, and an honest section on what we cannot measure yet.
Cornerstone · 11 min read
How Jigsaw Puzzles Are Made
Licensed artwork, two millimetres of recycled board, and a steel die bent by hand that cuts every piece in one stroke. The whole process, and what each step tells you about quality.
Cornerstone · 13 min read
Puzzle Questions, Answered
Short, direct answers to the questions customers actually ask us, with the full guides behind each one.
Index · updated as questions come in
Brand Encyclopedia
One definitive page per brand: where it came from, what the puzzles are physically like, the formats nobody else does, and who it genuinely suits.
Ravensburger
A German publisher from 1883 that did not make a jigsaw until 1964, and is now the brand every other one gets measured against. What Softclick actually means.
13 min read
Wasgij
Jigsaw spelt backwards, and the box lies to you on purpose. Launched 1997 by Jumbo, drawn for fifteen years by Graham Thompson.
16 min read
Gibsons
A £500 loan in 1919, bombed out of the factory in 1940, still run by the founder's great-granddaughter. Recycled British board and the 636 piece panorama.
14 min read
Clementoni
An Italian education company that makes puzzles, founded in Recanati in 1963. Vivid printing, every collection explained, and where it sits against Ravensburger.
10 min read
Cobble Hill
The brand that threw away the grid. Why a 1000 piece Cobble Hill might hold 1007 pieces, and why every box contains a poster.
10 min read
HEYE
The triangular box. A Munich magazine publisher that signed the cartoonist Mordillo in 1972 and built an artist-led range unlike anything else.
9 min read
Eurographics
A Montreal poster distributor that became the fine-art puzzle brand. Van Gogh, Klimt and Hokusai, plus the maps nobody else does.
9 min read
Thames & Hudson
An art book publisher since 1949, founded on the idea of a museum without walls. Why the Dinner With series works so well.
9 min read
Jumbo
Dutch, established 1853, and still cutting its own board. Not a house style but a publisher of four: Jumbo, Jan van Haasteren, Wasgij and Falcon de luxe.
10 min read
Falcon de Luxe
Turn a piece over and the back is blue, not grey. British nostalgia since 1976, and the one comparison that matters is against Gibsons.
9 min read
Cloudberries
The brand that made puzzles graphic instead of nostalgic. Thick matte board, colour-led images, and genuinely harder than the piece count suggests.
9 min read
Holdson
Auckland, 1939, plywood and a modified sewing machine. The reason half the Wasgij puzzles in Australia say Holdson rather than Jumbo.
9 min read
Choosing a puzzle
Before the picture, decide the commitment. These are the pages that stop you buying the wrong box.
Which puzzles are actually best?
Board thickness, cut quality, print finish and false fits. The four criteria worth being firm about, how each premium brand compares, and why we will not hand you a ranked list of eight.
Cornerstone · 11 min read
Piece counts explained
Every count, what it costs in time and table space, and why piece count is not the same thing as difficulty.
9 min read
How long does a 1000 piece puzzle take?
Three to ten hours for most adults. Here is what actually moves that number.
5 min read
Ravensburger or Clementoni?
Two 1000 piece puzzles at different prices. What the extra money actually buys.
Buying guide
How a puzzle is actually made
Board, lamination and the age of the cutting die decide whether a puzzle is good. Here is how one is built, and the checklist it gives you at the shelf.
Cornerstone · 13 min read
Is an older design a worse buy?
No, and our own sales say the opposite. Why a design still in print after five years is a stronger bet than this year's new release.
Original research · 12 min read
Accessories and storage
What you build on, what you keep it in, and what you do with it at the end. The half of puzzling nobody writes about properly.
Puzzle boards, mats and tables
Three products, one problem: the table is needed for dinner. Which one you actually need, what size suits each piece count, what goes wrong with cheap ones, and why we are not selling you a table.
Cornerstone · 12 min read
How to glue a jigsaw puzzle
Thin coats, from the front, dried flat. The full method, the two mistakes that warp a puzzle permanently, and when not to glue at all.
5 min read
What do you glue a puzzle to?
Glue bonds the puzzle to itself, and then it needs a backing. The four options, what each costs in Australia, and the frame size that actually fits.
6 min read
Building and finishing
Method, technique, and what to do with a puzzle once it is done.
How to glue a jigsaw puzzle
Thin coats, from the front, dried flat. Plus the two mistakes that ruin puzzles permanently.
5 min read
What do you glue a puzzle to?
Glue bonds the puzzle to itself, and then it needs a backing. The four options, what each costs in Australia, and the frame size that actually fits.
6 min read
What does Wasgij mean?
Jigsaw spelt backwards, pronounced "Woz-gidge". Why the name is really an instruction manual.
3 min read
Puzzles and the mind
Why the thing works on us the way it does.
The psychology of puzzling
Why a jigsaw calms you down, and what is actually happening while you sort edges.
Research
Is it OK to give up on a puzzle?
Why walking away feels so wrong, what readers who quit books already know, and why a stuck puzzle is not a boring book.
Guide · 9 min read
The week I could not stop puzzling
The other half of the same story. Why absorption has no off switch, where the line actually sits, and the rules that work when willpower does not.
Guide · 8 min read
The Premium Puzzles Index
Our own read on the puzzle market: what the world is buying, rebuilt daily from public data, and what a puzzle costs, measured year by year.
The Ravensburger 1000 Index
What a puzzle really costs, measured in work rather than dollars, every year since 2017.
Cornerstone · updated annually
Original research
The shelf nobody else in this market can fill, because it is built from our own sales and our own customers rather than from anybody's press release.
How long does a puzzle design stay popular?
Six years of our own sales, about 2,400 designs. How old a design is turns out to tell you nothing about how fast it sells, and 98% of the puzzles that look dead are just out of stock.
Original research · 12 min read
How often do people buy jigsaw puzzles?
About every three to four months, but the interval is the least interesting part. Buying turns out to have almost nothing to do with finishing, which says something about the pile in your cupboard.
Original research · 8 min read
Still in build. Four more sit behind a second dataset: we are collecting difficulty ratings and completion times from our own customers, puzzle by puzzle. When there is enough of it to stand behind, Australia's Favourite Puzzle Brands, The Hardest 1000-piece Puzzles, Which Brands Have the Fewest Missing Pieces and Average Completion Times by Piece Count get published here.
Until then, every claim we make about difficulty and timing on this site is labelled as experience and consensus rather than measurement, because that is what it is.
Artist Encyclopedia
Often the thing you are really shopping for. Nobody in Australia has written these properly.
Trevor Mitchell
The warm period scenes most people mean when they say a puzzle "looks like a Gibsons".
Planned
Mike Jupp
Dense, comic, dozens of small disasters at once. Behind the "I Love" range.
Planned
Graham Thompson
Drew Wasgij for fifteen years and more than fifty titles. Died 2020.
Planned
Aimee Stewart
The densest images in the category, built on a computer from photographs, drawing and paint. The three shapes her work takes, and the fox she hides in it.
9 min read
Colin Thompson
The other bookshelf artist, and the opposite imagination. Impossible architecture built out of books, by an English illustrator who became Australian.
Planned
Everything we actually have on the shelf
Shop puzzles
We only list what we physically hold, so nothing here is a back-order. Browse by piece count, brand or theme.
Why this exists
Most puzzle retailers, us included until now, publish a blog: a stack of posts in date order that nobody reads twice. That is the wrong shape for this. Almost every question a puzzler has is permanent, so the answer should be a page we keep improving rather than a post that slides down a feed.
So this library is ordered by usefulness, not by date, and every page carries the date we last reviewed it. If you find something out of date or plainly wrong, tell me and I will fix the page rather than write a new one.
If you would rather see the archive the ordinary way, every article, newest first.
Before you buy another one
There are four kinds of puzzler. Most people know which they are within two questions.
Seven questions, about two minutes. You get your type, the range that actually suits it, and the shadow: the thing your type gets wrong. That last part is the one people tell me is uncomfortably accurate.
Find out what you areNo charge, no catch. It takes longer to read this paragraph than to answer the first question.
Sources and further reading
- Premium Puzzles, Australia's Puzzle Institute. Shelf order is curated, not chronological.
Last reviewed and updated 7 September 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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