The Complete Guide to Cobble Hill Puzzles

Nearly every jigsaw puzzle you have ever built was cut on a grid. Rows and columns, knobs and holes, tidy repeating shapes. Cobble Hill threw the grid away, and that single decision is the entire reason to know about them.

The random cut, and why it matters

A conventional puzzle is cut with a die shaped like a grid. Thirty-eight across, twenty-seven down. Every piece is a variation on a small number of shapes, and when you finish, you can see the rows and columns in the surface if you look.

Cobble Hill's cutting dies follow no grid at all. Pieces are irregular, of varying size, with knobs and hollows in unexpected places, and the completed puzzle shows an abstract pattern of seams rather than a lattice.

This changes the actual experience of building in two opposite directions at once.

Why the piece count is approximate

This is the single most common question about the brand, and the answer is genuinely interesting rather than a defect.

A grid-cut puzzle has an exact count because it is rows times columns. A random cut has no rows and no columns, so the die produces however many pieces it produces. A Cobble Hill sold as 1000 pieces may contain 1007. It may contain 991.

Cobble Hill says so openly and advises against counting the pieces before you start.

So: if you count and come up short, nothing is missing. And if you have ever been driven slightly mad by the fact that a "1000 piece" puzzle from any brand is usually 1026 anyway, Cobble Hill is at least honest about it. There is more on why round piece counts are mostly fiction in The Complete Guide to Puzzle Piece Counts.

The poster in every box

Every Cobble Hill puzzle includes a full-size printed reference poster of the finished image.

It sounds minor. It is not, for three reasons:

1. You can lay it flat. A box lid has to be propped, and it is the wrong size. A poster sits beside the puzzle at actual scale.
2. Two people can use it. One box lid between two builders is a small, constant annoyance. Two references solves it.
3. It matters more here than elsewhere. With no shape sorting available, the image is doing more of the work, so having a proper reference is worth more on a random-cut puzzle than on a grid one.

Most brands do not include one. It is the sort of detail that tells you a company actually builds its own puzzles.

Family Pieces, the idea nobody else copies

Cobble Hill's Family Pieces format is a 350 piece puzzle containing three different piece sizes in the same box: large pieces at one end, medium through the middle, small at the other.

The point is a mixed-age table. A five-year-old works the large end, an older child takes the middle, an adult takes the small end, and everyone is building the same picture at the same time at a difficulty that suits them.

Anyone who has watched a young child lose interest in a puzzle that was too hard, or an adult get bored of one that was too easy, will see immediately why this is clever. It is the most thoughtful family format we stock, and it is strange that it has not been widely copied.

The house style

Cobble Hill has a look, and you will know within one puzzle whether it is yours.

Warm, nostalgic, illustrated, and full of small domestic detail. Cottage kitchens. Cats in libraries. Garden sheds. Birds through the seasons. Quilts, crochet, herb gardens, lantern light. Where Gibsons does British village nostalgia, Cobble Hill does a North American and rural-cosy version of the same instinct, often with animals somewhere in the frame.

They also run genuine fine art, with Hokusai and Carl Larsson in the current range, and licensed illustrated properties such as Brambly Hedge.

Ranges and collectable sets

Note the seasonal sets. Nature Journal and Country Diary are built to be collected across four titles, and collectable sets are how a brand earns a repeat customer rather than a single sale. If you like one, you will probably want the set.

Who it suits, and who it does not

Common questions