You pour the pieces out, you flip them all face-up, and you start puzzling.
Maybe you're the type who likes to start by sorting by colors or grabbing all the edge pieces, or maybe you're the wild type that just latches onto a color that calls out to you...
So for a while, you've got a bunch of clusters of connected pieces that you're growing.
Eventually you see how the clusters connect and the puzzle starts to come together.
And then you reach the stage where you've done all the easy stuff you could sort into clusters, and instead your focus is now mostly on the emerging picture, and you're mostly just putting the pieces directly into the main puzzle.
You know what I mean? This happens to everyone, not just me, right?
What do we call that stage, folks? Is there a name already for that and no one told us? If not, what should we name it?
Maybe the gestalt, because the parts have come together enough to be the puzzle and anchor the puzzling experience?
Google's Gemini AI generically suggests this stage should be called "filling it in," but that makes it sound like we are just pouring the rest of the pieces into a container, and lacks the sense of challenge and excitement and poetry I'm hoping for here.
It's too early to be the end game - in fact, I'd say the end game is when you have so few pieces left you know you're almost done. You might not finish right then, but you know you can finish when you want to.
If you're mostly puzzling as a couple, like we do, but one of you has wandered off, it's considered uncivilized to hit the end game and proceed without first calling out to the other person, "Hey we're in the endgame, shall I wait to finish with you?"
In poker, there's a similar moment called the Turn, it's when the 4th card is laid down visibly (in Texas Hold'em, the most popular style of poker these days). At the Turn the probabilities start to collapse and everything comes into focus.
In mystery novels, there's a similar set of stages: first, just trying to gather all the details, then connecting a few dots, and then at some point that seems most similar, you have a theory and try to resolve the rest of the facts. That's sometimes referred to as the deductive phase, but often the detective is riding on insight and intuition at still.
And that's how it feels to me when you hit that stage of puzzling: all the easy sort-able stuff is done, now you're looking at this full landscape of complex edges and visuals and you just sort-of soak it all in and go "oh i got it!"
So, anyone have a good name for that part of puzzling or like any of the ones above?