PieceAlive

PieceAlive is a jigsaw puzzle game, which means it is one of the few things on a games site that asks nothing of you. There is no fail state, no clock and no opponent. You pick a scene, pick whether you want it in few pieces or many, and then you rebuild it. The appeal of a jigsaw has never really been the challenge — it is that the task is completely legible. You always know what you are supposed to be doing and you can always make some amount of progress, which is a rarer feeling in games than it should be. The difficulty setting is the whole design: Easy is a pleasant ten minutes, Hard is an evening.

Choose a scene, then choose Easy, Moderate or Hard, which sets how many pieces the image is cut into. Study the reference picture, then drag each piece to where you think it belongs. Correctly placed pieces lock into position. Complete every piece and the scene is finished.

Do the edges first. It is advice so old it feels like a cliché, but it works because edge pieces are the only ones identifiable by shape alone rather than by content, so they cost you the least thinking. After that, sort by colour rather than by shape — your eye is far better at matching a shade of sky than at matching a tab profile. Work on regions with high contrast and detail before large flat areas, because a field of near-identical blue is much easier to finish when it is boxed in by pieces you have already placed. And if you stall on Hard, it is usually because you are trying to place a specific piece. Pick a region instead and find the piece that fits it.