what are the rules for playing jigsaw puzzles?

If you've found yourself turned on to jigsaw puzzles lately, you're not alone in your newfound fascination. Jigsaw puzzles offer a wide variety of colors, shapes, and sizes that provide hours of entertainment and stimulating mental engagement. But before you jump-start your puzzle-lovin' journey and let your imagination run wild, you need to understand the basic rules for playing jigsaw puzzles.

1. Separate and sort the pieces. One of the first steps when playing with a new puzzle is to separate all the pieces into distinct shaped piles – this makes it easier to determine whether all the pieces have been accounted for after trying out different combinations. Then, sort these piles by color groups or patterns.

2. Look for "edge-pieces". Edge-pieces will be those with one partly or fully straight edge and are key when starting out any jigsaw puzzle. Look closely at all parts of these pieces – defining edges may be subtle since they usually include small differences in colors that can be sometimes difficult to distinguish in certain lighting conditions or from a certain angle view.

3. Start at corner pieces .Once you've located some edge-pieces, start focusing on locating corner-pieces – these are very helpful in providing clues about how the image should look by giving an extra hint on how two sides will fit together.

4. Establish an area away from distractions .This is an important rule! Sometimes being interrupted by someone or something can leave us vulnerable to losing our jigsaw momentum completely as it can lead to losing track of which pieces we may have already used or even misplaced them purposely as frustration comes into play aggravating our experience even further. It's recommended to establish a designated jigsaw space with adequate lighting (good natural light sources are preferred).

5. Connect similar colors/patterns .Once you start building the foundation with edge and corner pieces pay attention to colors or patterns that might help you connect other unknown pairs together – if it doesn't fit don't force them! You may also use techniques like flipping some pieces upside down or rotating them until they make sense in order to join them side by side as smoothly as possible without gaps between them

6 Connect additional interior puzzles using hints areas .As every piece correlates location wise with its adjacent ones try visualizing small puzzle areas that can help finding small hints about where each unknown piece should go - this is especially helpful when dealing with contoured edges found within highly detailed images often found in more challenging puzzles - careful observation comes into play here!

7 Don't give up & accept limited victories !It's normal when faced with challenging sections during our puzzle-solving journey -it's ok if they take a while! Don't give up & accept partial victories like connecting sections such as trees, skies or complex animals even if full completion seems unachievable within reasonable time -this will give us enough validations of accomplishment that shall encourage us forward & reinvigorate our approach later on towards mopping up tiny but daunting last minute sections:)