The Complete Guide to Gibsons Puzzles

In 1919 a man walked into the Royal Bank of Scotland at Bishopsgate, borrowed £500 with nothing to secure it against, and bought a playing card business. In December 1940 a German bomb destroyed everything he had built with it. His sons restarted the company from a rented address in the West End, and their descendants still run it. That company is now one of the two or three names that define what a British jigsaw puzzle looks like.

Gibsons is worth understanding properly, because the history is not decoration. Almost everything distinctive about a Gibsons puzzle in 2026, the illustrated scenes, the odd piece counts, the recycled board, follows directly from decisions made in that hundred year run.

A hundred and seven years, in order

1919: a loan and a card company

Britain was coming out of the First World War when Harry Percy Gibson borrowed £500 from the Royal Bank of Scotland's Bishopsgate branch, unsecured, and used it to buy the International Card Company, a business originally founded in Glasgow that traded in playing cards. He renamed the venture H.P. Gibson & Sons, and from printing premises on Aldersgate Street in London he pushed it beyond cards and into board games.

The 1920s and 30s: the Big Four

The games were the making of the company. Gibsons became known for a set of military-themed titles remembered as the Big Four: L'Attaque, Dover Patrol, Aviation and Tri-Tactics. These were serious sellers in interwar Britain, and by 1939 Gibsons was competing with Waddingtons and Chad Valley, the giants of the British games trade.

Twenty good years. Then the war.

30 December 1940: the Blitz

The company's premises and all of its manufacturing equipment were destroyed in a bombing raid. For a manufacturer, losing the plant is usually the end, and plenty of British firms did not come back from exactly this.

Robert and Harry Gibson junior, the founder's sons, re-established the business from Barrett Street in London's West End. Trading properly resumed in 1946.

1973 to the 1980s: distribution, licences, and the move into jigsaws

Michael Gibson, grandson of the founder, took the leadership in 1973. Through the following decade the company built a catalogue of around 25 board game titles, including UK licences for Risk, Diplomacy and UNO, alongside its own classics like 221B Baker Street. It relocated to Colliers Wood.

Then, in the 1980s, Gibsons released its first range of jigsaw puzzles. The subject was aerial photographs of Britain and its familiar landmarks. (Gibsons' own history dates this to the mid-1980s, other accounts to the late 1980s, so treat it as "the 1980s" and do not put money on the year.)

It is worth pausing on how ordinary that first range was. Aerial photographs are the least Gibsons-like thing imaginable next to what the brand became. The house style, illustrated, warm, narrative, was found later.

2002: the blue box

Gibsons launched the blue box livery in 2002. Shelf identity in a category where customers browse visually is worth an enormous amount, and the blue box is the reason a Gibsons puzzle is recognisable from across a shop.

2016 onwards: the fourth generation, and a hard sustainability turn

Kate Gibson, Michael's daughter and the founder's great-granddaughter, became managing director in 2016, with her cousin Nicki Gumbrell as sales director. The company had moved to Sutton in 2006, celebrated its centenary in 2019 by relaunching a limited edition of L'Attaque, and by then had grown the puzzle range past 250 titles.

Under the fourth generation the defining decision has been sustainability, taken further than the category norm: 100% recycled puzzle board, plastic-free packaging, certified B Corp status in November 2023, and a King's Award for Sustainable Enterprise in 2025. Jigsaw puzzles now account for roughly 70% of sales, so the company that was built on board games is, in practice, a puzzle company.

What you are actually buying

Strip away the branding and a Gibsons puzzle has four consistent physical characteristics.

That last point is the one that matters most and gets discussed least. A photographic puzzle is a surface: you sort by colour and texture and you finish. An illustrated narrative scene is full of discrete incidents, a dog stealing a sausage, a child about to be told off, a bus at an unwise angle, and each incident is a self-contained region you can build as a small puzzle of its own. It makes a 1000 piece Gibsons feel more like a series of little victories than one long grind.

The artists, and why they matter more than the subject

With Gibsons you are buying an illustrator as much as a picture, and two names carry a lot of the range.

Trevor Mitchell is the one most people mean when they say a puzzle "looks like a Gibsons". Warm period scenes, English streets and shops, a strong sense of a particular decade. If you liked one, look for his name rather than for a similar subject.

Mike Jupp works the opposite register: densely comic, chaotic, dozens of small disasters happening at once, best known for the "I Love" series. Jupp puzzles are the ones that are still funny on the fourth evening, and they reward the incident-by-incident building style described above.

Beyond those two the roster is largely British illustrators, and the brand's own comic ranges (the Jokesaws line is a good example) sit in the Jupp tradition.

The formats, including the 636 piece oddity

Gibsons runs a wider spread of formats than most brands, and a couple of them do not exist properly anywhere else.

Why 636

The 636 count looks arbitrary and is not. A panorama is much wider than it is tall, and if you take a standard 500 or 1000 piece grid and stretch it into that shape you get pieces with awkward proportions. 636 divides cleanly into a long rectangle while keeping the piece a sensible square-ish size. It is a manufacturing answer to a geometry problem, and it is now one of the fastest ways to identify a Gibsons on a shelf.

Panoramas also build differently. There is far more edge relative to interior, so the frame takes longer and gives you more to work with once it is done, and long horizontal scenes tend to be built left to right like reading rather than outside-in.

Why the 4 x 500 multipacks are underrated

Four separate 500 piece puzzles sharing a theme, in one box, at a better price per puzzle. This is the single best format for a household where more than one person puzzles, or for anyone who likes finishing something in an evening. It is also, bluntly, the best value box in the shop most of the time.

Gibsons or Ravensburger

This is the comparison Australian customers actually ask for, so here it is without hedging.

Put simply: Ravensburger has the better engineering, Gibsons has the better stories. If your priority is the physical experience of a perfect cut, Ravensburger wins. If your priority is spending three evenings inside a scene you enjoy looking at, that is a question about artwork, and Gibsons is very strong on artwork.

Who Gibsons suits

Common questions