It’s Tuesday again and that means it’s Tips Day! Each Tuesday we’ll be showcasing one of Pogo.com’s games and collecting your tips, insights, and hints for playing the games, earning more tokens in them, and earning their badges more easily.
Let’s talk about Jigsaw Detective! There were 70 Jigsaw Detective cases, and you can earn a badge for completing each one. The weekly, premium, and mix-n-match badges available for Jigsaw Detective are for these types of challenges:
* Solve a puzzle on X difficulty or above in X minutes or less
* Solve X puzzles
We’ve got a few tips already, but please share your tips for completing these jigsaw puzzles and cases easier and faster in a comment below! Thank you!
nessa says
Play the Archive puzzles on skill level medium then switch to easy for the Clue puzzles.
Pieces for the frame for each specific puzzle are always in the same place, after playing for a few you get to remember where they are so you can finish you frame in less than 1 minute, this is useful if you need to complete a puzzle is less than X minutes for a badge.
Find a puzzle that is easy for you and do it over and over again. I find that puzzles with bridges on them are the easiest to solve because they have 3 distinctive layers of color/pattern: water, bridge, sky.
It may sound boring to do the same puzzle all the time for every single case but then you can challenge yourself to do it faster and faster everytime and beat your previous time.
Once you get the rythm you can solve a case in 2 hours or less.
cnaten says
i play on medium level because you don’t advance when you play on hard level but after inserting the last piece of the puzzle i change from medium level to hard level and it will give you more points for completing the puzzle in a faster time.
Cyndi says
This game can definitely be defined as an easy badge for the badge hungry. Especially if you know tricks to the trade and can tolerate the monotony for the sake of a badge. I have all the badges for this game and while I miss the easy badge part of me is glad I have them all.
I too play the same puzzle over and over again. You end up having to do something like 30 puzzles to complete the badge. (however I average about 3 mins per puzzle but play as I watch tv too) I found there is one puzzle with colored layers. I think it was water scene. The bottom layer was water and the middle was dark for buildings and then the top was a lighter blue. You do eventually remember where all the pieces go and can complete a badge in a few hours. If I was extremely bored I could do the dart board one pretty fast as well. Just for a change of pace.
Play medium level you have less puzzles to complete than easy. Medium and Hard progress at the same rate but you have to rotate the pieces for hard and it naturally takes longer. I never mastered the play on one level and switch for the last piece. It always reset my game but it might work for some people.
Good Luck
sog says
Hi BH 🙂 Finally a moment to breath, and read some BadgeHungry comments, with that appropriately named Pesty Problem Badge behind me.
JD – I think the puzzle part of this game is very similar to Jigsaw Treasure Hunter. So…
I generally like to do different puzzles. The hint about the edge pieces always being in the same position applies to all puzzles, that is, it does not matter what pzl you do, they will all have the same layout. (I think this is also the case with all the other pieces.) This makes it very easy to get my border done quickly on ANY puzzle.
After finishing the border I group the other pieces along the outside edges, a bit of sorting along the way but mostly concerned with quickly dropping groups from drawer to edges so they are spread out so I can see as many as possible. The MAGNET is the best device ever, makes moving the pieces very easy.
Now I try to work whatever areas catch my eye such as a building, or contrasting items or colors like sky against trees. The SHADE OF BACKROUND or whatever is extremely helpful!!! Often I will change my backround shade part way thru a puzzle as I move from very light to very dark areas in the puzzle.
Another thing I do sometimes is to use the drawer as another area to sort or hold pieces:
1 – If I have a pzl with about equal dark / light areas, I may only take the light pieces to the edges to work with, leaving the dark pieces in the drawer. This way I can work with the light pieces more quickly as they are not buried under other pieces. (I use the magnet so I can move several pieces at a time.)
2 – At times I have small parts of a puzzle put together but don’t know yet where they fit, so I put them in the drawer to get them out of the way.
3 – The Puzzle Drawer – I have also used the drawer as added sorting space. The drawer has 3 different ‘open’ positions, IIRC. There are at least two ways to do this; the one I use is to click and drag the HANDLE of the drawer to the position I want. This has me with the drawer only partially open so I can see those pieces along with the pieces I’ve spread out along the edges.
These things make most puzzles playable for me at a good pace and I enjoy it more. I like jigsaw puzzles and recently was gifted some IRL. I have taken days off of pogo to enjoy doing these, real pieces to look at, to pick up and feel in my fingers, to physically put in with the pieces around it, to see all this in REAL LIFE 3D, lol. Reminded me how truly different it all is, the virtual from the real.
Jillian says
Lura,
I posted a step-by-step edge piece placement over a year ago that works for Jigsaw Detective and Treasure Hunter medium puzzles (easy and hard are pretty much identical, plus or minus a side piece or two). I don’t know which you’d prefer, cut and paste or just the link, but I think it should at least be referenced here:
https://www.badgehungry.com/2009/05/29/weekend-open-thread-badge-help-bonanza/#comment-2274
Sheljin says
sog #4 – Thanks for taking the time to give tips for people who just like to solve puzzles – very helpful! My Mom was a huge jigsaw puzzle fan IRL – your description of doing them reminded me of her. ;>
Jillian #5 – Thanks for including the link to your post from 2009 – that was before my time, so it was great to see it all spelled out like that!
~Shel ;>
Pixelated1959 says
I like to sort by first edge pieces, then by color… Pull the edges and corners out, put them together, then go look at the picture again, and sort the rest by color, easy pie, one of my favorites!
nferno8 says
to avoid having to spend time transferring pieces from the drawer to the table i put the edge together then open the drawer and put the center pieces together while still in the drawer. it will also give you a larger sorting area. after the center is assembled you can slide the whole center down onto the table and into the puzzle.