In the old days, many wooden jigsaw puzzles came with no picture on the box, just a tantalizing title.
(For more on jigsaw puzzle history, see Bob Armstrong's webpage here or check out Anne Williams book on jigsaw puzzles).
Traditionalist puzzlers are still a bit disdainful of looking at the picture, as though it's sort of cheating.
It's definitely a bit different experience, a little harder, a little more of a puzzle.
On the other hand, we hear a lot of you enjoy looking at the artwork the whole time as part of what makes puzzling fun.
Personally, we do our puzzles without the picture because most of the time we're testing new puzzles and we can't print up the labels until we've finalized the design and piece count! But even when we re-do puzzles, we find it more satisfying to put the box back on the shelf while we puzzle it all out.
So, how many of you are hard-core puzzlers who don’t use the picture?
Well in a recent customer survey (that pops up after you buy a puzzle on our website), we asked:
“Do you look at the picture on the box when doing a puzzle?”
Yes: 53%
Only When Stuck: 30%
Nope: 17%
Happy Puzzling!
When my father first taught me to do puzzles, he said that looking at the box was cheating. Since that time, I have always done all my puzzles (whether 100 or 3000pc) without looking at the box. That was ahem a few years ago now. More recently, I was trying to see how fast I could do a puzzle, and I learned that most competition puzzling is done with the box top. What?! I’ve been timing my puzzling to see how fast I am (no box top) and decided to tried one with the box top too. I can see ways to use the box top more effectively to reduce my time, but it just isn’t as fun (I like to ‘see’ the visual patterns at the piece level, group them and watch the image emerge. Using the box top means I am always relating each piece to a known whole). While I can accept that using the box top isn’t cheating, I’m staying with my preferred approach to spend 30 seconds looking at the image before I open the box and hide the top, so that I cannot even glance at it by accident.
I love to do jigsaws and I only like to 500 ones I can do jigsaws with out looking at the picture on the box ,as looking at the picture when doing a jigsaw is cheating