The Complete Guide to Ravensburger Puzzles

Every puzzle brand in this guide gets compared to one company, and it is a German publishing house that spent its first eighty years not making jigsaws at all. If you have ever put down a puzzle piece, felt it click, and known without checking that it was right, that sensation is the thing Ravensburger sells.

A publisher that fell into puzzles

Ravensburger is not a toy company that learned to print. It is a printer and publisher that learned to make toys, and that order explains almost everything about the product.

1883. Otto Robert Maier signs his first author contract in Ravensburg, a town in Upper Swabia in southern Germany, on 7 May. The business publishes instruction folders for craftsmen and architects, which is dull and profitable, and it gives him a printing operation.

1884. The first board game, Journey Around the World. A publisher noticing that the same presses can print games.

1900. The blue triangle is registered with the Imperial patent office. It is one of the older continuously used trademarks in the toy trade, and it is still the fastest way to identify the brand across a shop.

By 1912 the range is selling across Western Europe, the Danube Monarchy and Russia, and by the outbreak of the First World War the company offers around 800 products: picture books, activity books, art instruction manuals, reference books and games.

The early jigsaws are worth pausing on, because they were not entertainment. Otto Maier's first puzzles were geography teaching aids, made to help students memorise where countries, cities and rivers sat. A puzzle was a way of getting a map into a child's memory.

1964 is the year that actually matters for puzzlers: the company begins producing jigsaw puzzles as a proper product line, and in the same year opens subsidiaries in Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Everything most people think of as "a Ravensburger puzzle" starts here, eighty-one years after the company did.

Since then it has stayed family owned while buying its way outward: the Swedish wooden-train maker BRIO in 2015, the American game publisher Wonder Forge in 2017, and a majority stake in Steiff, the German soft-toy house, in 2026. The catalogue now runs to roughly 1,800 books and 850 games, exported to more than fifty countries.

What you are actually paying for

Not the artwork. Ravensburger commissions good artwork, but so does everybody. The premium is manufacturing, and it comes down to four things. The following are the company's own published claims about their construction, and they match what the puzzles feel like on a table.

Softclick, and what it means at the table

"Softclick" is a marketing word for something genuinely useful, so it is worth translating.

If every piece in a puzzle has a unique shape, then a piece fits in exactly one place. That sounds obvious. It is not how all puzzles work. On a loosely cut puzzle, several pieces will seat plausibly in the same gap, and you can build an entire region wrong, feel fine about it, and discover the error an hour later when nothing else lines up.

That single property changes three things:

1. You stop second-guessing. A piece either goes in or it obviously does not. No holding it up to the light wondering if it is close enough.
2. Assembled sections travel. A tight fit means you can slide a finished corner across the table, or lift a section onto a board, without it shedding pieces. Anyone who builds on a mat cares about this more than anything else on the box.
3. Mistakes cannot compound. The hour you would have lost to a wrongly built region is the real return on the extra money.

The series worth knowing

Ravensburger's range is enormous, and browsing it by picture alone is overwhelming. Browsing by series is much faster, because each one has a consistent character.

Two notes from actually stocking this range.

The numbered series are collectable, and that matters commercially. Nature Edition #17, Power of Nature #3, Leisure Days No 4 and No 6. People who start a numbered series tend to keep going, which makes them worth watching for rather than buying at random.

Aimee Stewart is the artist name to know. Densely detailed, warm, often bookish or nautical interiors packed with objects. Her puzzles build the way a good illustrated scene should, as a series of small discoveries rather than one flat surface.

Piece counts, and the very large ones

Our Ravensburger range spans 500 to 5,000 pieces, which is worth saying plainly because the brand is often assumed to be a 1000-piece-only proposition. It is not.

Ravensburger also periodically makes the largest commercial puzzle in the world, apparently for the sport of it. A 32,256 piece Keith Haring puzzle in September 2010, then Disney titles at 40,320 pieces. Wonderful as a fact. Not a purchase.

Is it worth the money?

The straight answer: it depends entirely on which part of puzzling you care about.

For a direct comparison with the value end of the market, see Ravensburger or Clementoni. For the opposite comparison, against a brand competing on artwork and recycled British board rather than engineering, see The Complete Guide to Gibsons Puzzles.

How to choose one

1. Pick the piece count from the time you have, not from how good you think you are. Our guide to piece counts covers why that is the right way round.
2. Then pick a series, not a picture. Series have consistent character, so if you liked one Lost Places you will like the next. Browsing 138 individual images is how people give up and buy nothing.
3. Then check the artwork for large single-colour areas. Lots of open sky or water means considerably longer. That may be exactly what you want, but decide on purpose.
4. If you are buying a gift, choose an illustrated scene over a photograph. Illustrated scenes have distinct regions to build, which makes them more forgiving and more fun for someone who does not puzzle constantly.

Common questions