I competed in the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships – it was the most stressful day of my life

With her daughter’s advice to ‘start practising or you’ll disgrace the nation’ in her ears, could our writer complete with the giants?

My heart pounds and my shoulders tense as my fingers hover over identikit pieces of steel grey cloud. “Surely this one…, no this one, aargh it must be this one,” I think, frantically trying to slot them together. Suddenly, my concentration is interrupted by an almighty cheer from the surrounding crowds.
Poland’s Weronika Huptas has become the first in our group stage to finish the puzzle in 41 minutes, two seconds. “She is joking!” the Slovakian next to me mutters in disbelief. But at least he has made headway on “Sunset in Copenhagen”, our fiendishly difficult Ravensburger puzzle. I haven’t even got my edges together. I feel like a child in an exam, who has none of the answers, watching the clock count down. Here at the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships in Valladolid, Spain, I am hopelessly out of my depth.
Puzzling has long been a passion, the mindful allure of getting lost in a jigsaw so great I started an Instagram account for my creations during the pandemic (bio: “because puzzles are cheaper than therapy.”) And where better to puzzle than at the world championships, where the challenge in the individuals’ competition (there are also pairs and teams’ tournaments) is to be among the fastest to finish a 500-piece puzzle within a 90-minute time limit.
“But wouldn’t that normally take you days?” my husband Chris asks when I announce I have paid the 50 euros registration fee to compete for Great Britain. He’s right. There was no minimum requirement for entry, and I realise in my excitement I may have mistaken my enthusiasm for skill and, crucially, speed. I am a leisurely, or “long distance” puzzler, as my 11-year-old son Felix puts it diplomatically. My daughter Rosie, 13, is blunter: “OMG you had better start practising or you will disgrace the nation.”
A training session reveals it takes me three hours to finish a 500-piecer (that I have done half a dozen times before). Hmmm. I contacted Anneka Thompson, president of the UK Jigsaw Puzzle Federation (WJPC) who is also competing and lets me into the WhatsApp group for British contestants. According to the WJPC website, there are 42 of us. The 22 on the WhatsApp group so far are unstintingly friendly, welcoming – and talking about one-hour completion times and the competition being streamed live on YouTube. Gulp.
Getting up at 2.30am to catch my flight to Madrid, then missing the train stop for Valladolid in northwest Spain, home to the World Championships since its conception six years ago, doesn’t help me feel competition ready, and by the time I arrive at the town’s Millennium Dome my nerves are shredded.
Competitors – 1,170 in total – are younger than I had expected and predominantly female. Most, including UK contestants, wear national team T-shirts. Seventy-four countries are represented, the largest contingencies from Germany (161 contestants) and the States (116), among the smallest Morocco and Uruguay (both one).
Excitement mounts as Group A contestants are seated, each sharing a table with one other, and the rules read out by a head honcho standing on stage at the front, whose name I don’t catch. Each of the six individual group stages (I am in the second, Group B) has a different 500-piece puzzle, concealed in a bag on the table. Headphones are allowed; pets aren’t. The 30 fastest participants from each country will progress to the semi-finals, another 30 progressing on the basis of fastest times alone. Judges patrol the area, alert for finishers’ raised hands.
“Are you ready to puzzle?” head honcho roars. There’s a cheer from spectators, ten-deep in places, as Group A’s 182 contestants simultaneously rise to their feet. A ripping of plastic puzzle bags, a flutter of 91,000 cardboard pieces falling onto tables, and they’re off. The fastest are not so much puzzlers as magicians, I marvel, their fingers miraculously flipping and sorting pieces in seconds as they pass through.
Outside, I meet Anneka, 40, and teammate Steven Greenfields, 53, triumphant after their 13-strong team (including three “subs”) smashed Britain’s record by four minutes to come seventh out of 22 countries to finish a 2,000-piecer this morning – an achievement born of “meticulous planning,” Steven explains: “We had two of the top three pairs in the country, so we put them together. We had a hit squad sorting and distributing. Anneka and I started off the edges, so we had a good frame to work from.”
A married father-of-four from London, he adds: “I’m a lawyer so my work is solving puzzles. It’s that thrill you get when you crack something.” He’s been to the national Sudoku finals but says everyone was a maths graduate with a physics PhD. “There’s all sorts of people.”
There doesn’t seem to be many speed-puzzling novices such as myself, however. “Flip it over as quickly as possible. Put the edges to one side,” he suggests when I ask for advice. “Let it speak to you. If you get stuck, move onto the next thing.”
Anneka, 40, a “competitive” CrossFit trainer from Harrogate, Yorkshire, on her third world championships, says whether to start with the edges depends on the jigsaw – “last year we had a round puzzle and the general tactic there was inside out” – but that posture is key: “I definitely recommend finding a stance that doesn’t kill your back. In here they recognise me for the way I stand at the table. I’m straight up, flat back, bent knees.”
Her partner, an electrician, is a “non-puzzler”, and some of her friends think her hobby is “nerdy” but for her it’s a form of escapism, a “shut my brain off thing” she started doing more during Covid. “People would come round and say, ‘you did that quickly.’ I didn’t have any idea what quickly meant, so I googled ‘fast times for puzzles.’” She discovered the world championships, which were cancelled because of Covid in 2020 and 2021, “started practising and got faster and faster.”
A massive cheer erupts. Norwegian Kristin Thuv, 30, has become the first to finish Group A in 26 minutes, 56 seconds, her face broadcast on a giant screen by the stage. Something of a celebrity in the puzzling community – she came second in 2022 puzzling with one hand – she tells me “a lot of practice seems to help” and she tries to do “four or five puzzles during the weekends.”
Also through is Dan Martin, 32, who got a personal best with 52 minutes, 45 seconds, “and ten seconds of that was a penalty because I couldn’t find one of my pieces,” he shrugs. Watching, although not advising as that is grounds for disqualification, was girlfriend SJ Bodell, 38, in Group B with me.
The couple have puzzled together since their third date 12 years ago. “She came round to mine and there was a puzzle on the table. I’d been doing it with my housemates,” recalls Dan, a university planner from London. “They were quite annoyed with me actually when they came home and we’d finished it.”
SJ, a content designer, also from London, says even in a competitive environment she finds puzzling “peaceful. It centres me.” She and Dan are also competing in pairs – the mixed doubles of the championship, so to speak – when they will have 75 minutes to complete a 500-piecer. “Generally I start from the top down. She starts from the bottom up,” says Dan. Both concede SJ is faster, but, she says, Group B is “the most stacked with talent. Just remember that when people start clapping and finishing.”
Great. I meet nine-year-old Alma Belle Baharal, from Gibraltar, Spain’s national jigsaw champion (children’s category) for three years running, who also came 19th out of 400 in the adults’ category this year. Tomorrow she is competing for Britain in pairs.
She insists she’s not nervous: “It’s relaxing!” Then again, she has been puzzling since her mum Maya, 48, a teacher, bought her a wooden puzzle when she was six months old. “Try flipping the pieces over in under three minutes,” Alma advises. Yet it’s my stomach that’s flipping as I decline Steven’s offer of a slice of pizza – “some people find puzzling makes them hungry,” he says – and run to the toilet for a last-minute panic wee.
As soon as we start and I open the puzzle, my heart sinks. Unlike Group A’s Ravensburger puzzle, “Boathouses in Smogen, Sweden,” ours – “Sunset in Copenhagen” – has no sharp lines or bright colours. It is an interminable mass of faded sky, sea, people and buildings that I have no idea how to navigate. Can I complain? 
But a bad puzzler blames their picture, I decide. There is no time to waste stewing. Or scouring the floor for edge pieces I swear don’t exist, for that matter. I try to channel Steven by letting the puzzle speak to me, but if it is talking at all, it is telling me I have grotesquely overestimated my abilities. A surreptitious glance at my Slovakian neighbour, who quickly constructs the sea and buildings, confirms my suspicions.
Every minute or so there is more deafening applause as another elite puzzler finishes. The arena starts to empty, the watching crowds, alas, remain present. Any thoughts of excelling evaporate as my mission becomes simpler: I must not reap shame on my country. And so I keep trying, each piece fitted a minor triumph, until time is called, and I slump in my seat, exhausted. As a non-finisher my outstanding pieces are counted to assess my final position. I have done a paltry 210 pieces. Thankfully, SJ fares better. The highest placed Group B Brit, she finishes 38 and makes it through to the semi-finals with a time of 1hr, 2 mins, 35 seconds.
I arrive back in Britain, buzzing from my effort, if not my success, to find out I have come 176 out of the 181 in Group B. “Everyone else was moving their hands around quickly,” says Rosie, who was watching me compete on YouTube. “You were just sort of sitting there.” Chris is philosophical: “At least you didn’t come last.” Every cloud, I suppose. As long as it’s not on “Sunset in Copenhagen”.