Piece by piece: the story of your puzzles, one piece at a time

An 8,000-piece puzzle doesn't get finished in one evening. It gets lived with for weeks: the sorting, the edge, the sky that refuses to cooperate, the table you walk around, the photo you send your sister on a Sunday night.

Until now, The Puzzlovers only kept the last image: the finished puzzle, the rating, the review. Everything else, the weeks that led up to it, vanished.

Piece by piece fixes that. A puzzle you start becomes a journey: your sessions land on it one by one, the people around you follow along, cheer you on, leave a word. And when the last piece drops, the journey tells its own story.

1. Starting a journey

It all begins with the "Add" button, like any other puzzle. You pick the puzzle, then answer "Where are you at?": "In progress". A new option opens up: "Full journey tracking".

It asks for one thing to open the journey: a photo of the start, the box, the pieces spread out, a corner of the table, or just a sentence. That's your first step. If you'd rather mark the puzzle as in progress without telling anything, the other option does that, and the journey can open later.

Already in your to-do pile?

From its page, one tap: "I'm starting". The puzzle moves to in progress, and a sheet offers the same thing, without forcing anything on you.

Three possible answers: a photo of the table, just a sentence, or "Later". A puzzle that's already well under way can open its journey too: the sheet then talks about where you are, not about a start.

2. Telling it, session after session

After that, one puzzling session = one step. You open the journey and you add: one or more photos, a sentence if you feel like it, the time you spent, your mood, and where you've got to (as a percentage or in pieces placed).

None of it is required. A single photo is enough.

The journey page does the rest: it counts the sessions, adds up the hours, draws the curve of your progress from the third estimate onwards, and files your photos into a strip you scroll back through with one finger.

Below each step, two gestures for the people reading you:

• Cheer, the little biceps. It doesn't judge anything, it says "keep going". The people around you can leave one even without an account: a link sent by message is enough.
• Words: a short comment, under the step it's about. You can turn them off at any time, and nobody is told.

A step you regret, a blurry photo? You remove it, and it goes to a bin where you can find it again for 30 days.

And if the puzzle drags on? "Set aside" puts the journey away with no public trace at all. No badge, no abandonment counter, no guilt-tripping reminder. A puzzle that waits is just a puzzle that waits.

Following someone's journey, picking up your own

A journey you enjoy can be followed: you hear about it when it moves forward, at most once a day, even if three steps land the same evening. No streak to keep, no nudging, no counter of missed days: that is not how we do things here.

To spot who has a journey moving forward, look at the avatars: a dark ring surrounds them, filled to match the progress. It only lights up for a journey with a step less than seven days old, never for a puzzle simply marked in progress, and it goes dark if you set the journey aside. You'll see it on profiles, in the members directory, on build pages and on a puzzle's page, where it counts who is assembling it right now. One tap opens the journey.

And on your side, your home page now opens on "Your puzzles in progress": the latest photo of each journey, where you've got to, and the button to add tonight's session. Just below, "Progress from your Puzzlovers" shows the journeys of the people you follow.

3. Finishing, and sharing

At the last piece, you finish the journey from its page: your rating, the difficulty, your review. The page then changes its face.

It keeps everything: the photo album, the number of sessions, the days elapsed, the time at the table, your review, the curve from start to finish, and the cheers you picked up along the way.

Two ways to send it out into the world:

• "Replay the journey": a full-screen story, your photos in order, watched like a short film.
• Your journey cards: up to five images ready to post, as a story or a square. The cover, the figures, the curve, the film strip of photos, and the people who followed along.

Thank you, Mangoya

Mangoya, one of our ambassadors, tested Piece by piece before anyone else, and not on a warm-up: "Ville de rêve", 8,000 pieces, Educa. She opened her journey on 4 October and has been feeding it ever since. As we write: 6 sessions, 7 photos, 13 hours at the table, 1,520 pieces placed.

Thank you to her for taking the first hits. Her journey is still in progress, so you can follow it and cheer her on:

👉 Mangoya's journey on "Ville de rêve"

A first version

This one is the first. It's honest, but it's young: there are surely things you'll miss, and others that will get in your way.

That's exactly the moment to tell us. Write to us from the contact page: every message is read, and the feedback on this first version will decide what the next one looks like.

Happy journeying.