A Short History of Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles

By Simon I., Founder of Opus Puzzles. Published May 29, 2026.

The thing that surprised me most when I started making wooden puzzles was the history. I had it backwards. Like most people, I assumed the cardboard jigsaw was the original, the normal one, and that wood was a fancy modern upgrade some company dreamed up to charge more. It is the exact reverse. Wood came first by a long way, and cardboard is the cheap newcomer that pushed it aside. Once I learned that, the whole object started to feel different in my hands. So here is the short history of the wooden jigsaw puzzle, from a London schoolroom in the 1760s to the laser on my workbench today.

Were the first jigsaw puzzles made of wood?

The first jigsaw puzzle started life as a classroom aid. The Victoria and Albert Museum credits a London mapmaker named John Spilsbury with inventing the "dissected puzzle" in the 1760s. His recipe was about as simple as it gets. He glued a printed map onto a thin sheet of wood, then cut it apart along the map's boundaries with a fine saw. A child could take the pieces apart and put them back together, and learn the shape of the places on the map while they did it. There is something I like about that. The heirloom version of a puzzle today, the one people frame and pass down, started as the cheapest teaching trick a mapmaker could think of.

That was the whole product. Printed paper on wood, cut by hand, sold to teach. There was no picture of a kitten, no thousand-piece landscape, none of what we think of as a puzzle now. Just a map and a saw and a clever idea. And crucially, it was wood. Britannica notes the puzzle picture was "originally attached to wood and later to paperboard," which is the entire story of this article in nine words. Wood first. Paperboard later.

When did jigsaw puzzles become an adult hobby?

For the next century and a half, the jigsaw slowly stopped being only for children. By the early 1900s, hand-cut wooden puzzles had grown into a genuine adult hobby, and a fairly upscale one, because each puzzle took real time and skill to make. Parker Brothers saw the trend and jumped on it. Their Pastime line, according to Wikipedia, was "made by Parker Brothers from 1908 to 1958," a fifty-year run.

These were not stamped out by a machine. A person sat with a fretsaw and cut each piece one at a time. That slow, human process is also where one of my favourite details comes from. The Pastime puzzles started slipping in shaped pieces, the same trick we still use. As the same source records, the line's "first figure pieces representing items such as letters, animals, and symbols started to appear in 1909," with "approximately 12 figure pieces out of 100 pieces" in a typical box. Something close to that ratio still feels about right in the puzzles we make today. If you want the longer story on those shaped pieces, I wrote about what whimsy pieces are separately, but the headline is that they are old, and they were always a wooden thing.

What happened to puzzles during the Great Depression?

Here is where the story takes its strange turn. The jigsaw puzzle had its single biggest boom during the worst economic years in modern memory. People were broke during the Great Depression, and they bought puzzles anyway, because a puzzle was a cheap, long evening of entertainment you could do again and again. Demand went through the roof.

The detail that catches me every time is the labour. That same Wikipedia article notes the Pastime cutting team grew "from around two dozen puzzle cutters in 1927 to more than 100 cutters in the early 1930s." Picture that. The economy is collapsing, and the puzzle company is hiring dozens of people to sit and cut wooden puzzles by hand. For a moment, the old craft was booming.

Then the machine arrived and ended it. The Strong National Museum of Play describes how makers "mass-produced die-cut cardboard puzzles and sold them cheaply enough for most Americans to afford, even in the midst of the Great Depression." A steel die is a giant cookie cutter. One stamp comes down on a sheet of printed cardboard and the whole puzzle drops out at once. The economics are brutal and simple. A person cutting by hand finishes very few wooden puzzles in a day. A die stamps out far more cardboard ones in the same time. Cardboard did not beat wood because it was better. It beat wood the way the Model T beat the horse and carriage. It was good enough, and it was cheap enough that everyone could finally afford one. If you want the full comparison of the two materials as they stand today, I laid it out in wooden puzzles versus cardboard jigsaws.

The quiet decades

Wood did not vanish overnight. It just stopped being the default. Through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, if you walked into a department store and bought a jigsaw puzzle, it was cardboard. That was simply what a puzzle was now. Wooden puzzles slid into a small, expensive niche, the sort of thing a serious hobbyist sought out rather than something you grabbed off a shelf. For about forty years, the original version of the jigsaw was the unusual one, and the copy was the normal one. A whole generation grew up assuming, as I did, that cardboard was how puzzles had always been.

When did wooden puzzles make a comeback?

Then a single phone call nudged the old craft back to life. In 1974, a man named Steve Richardson got an unusual offer. According to the Wikipedia article on Stave Puzzles, "Richardson was offered US$300 to make a wooden jigsaw puzzle." Three hundred dollars, in 1974 money, for one puzzle. That number tells you what wood had become after cardboard claimed the mass market. It was no longer the cheap entertainment of the Depression. It was a luxury object again, the way it had been before Spilsbury's idea went mainstream.

Richardson and his friend Dave Tibbetts started a company in Norwich, Vermont, and named it Stave, a blend of their two first names, Steve and Dave. Today, the same source notes, "Stave Puzzles is the largest hand-cut jigsaw puzzle company in the United States." They proved there was still a real market for the original, slow, wooden version, and a handful of other makers followed them over the next few decades.

How this history convinced me to start a puzzle company

I did not start making wooden puzzles because of any of this. I started because every cardboard puzzle my family finished died the same slow death, with soft bent corners and a missing piece under the couch. The history came later, when I was deep in research trying to work out whether a small wooden-puzzle company was a foolish idea or a real one.

I kept expecting to find that wood was a recent gimmick, a way to charge forty dollars for what should be a twelve-dollar product. Instead I found Spilsbury and his maps. I found Parker Brothers running a fifty-year line. I found a hundred people cutting puzzles by hand through the worst years of the Depression, and a man in Vermont who got paid three hundred dollars to make a single one in 1974. I remember the evening it clicked, sitting at my kitchen table with a dozen browser tabs open and a mug of coffee gone cold. What I was building had a lineage that ran back two and a half centuries. That is a very different feeling from launching a gimmick, and it is most of the reason Opus Puzzles exists.

Where are wooden puzzles now?

The last piece of the story is the one that put a wooden puzzle back within reach of a normal household, and it is the reason a company like mine can exist. The laser. A laser cutter does the same job a person with a fretsaw used to do, cutting any shape you can draw, but it does it quickly and cheaply and at scale. In our own workshop, that single change is what pulled the price down from the collector-only range Stave was charging in the 1970s to something a lot more people can afford. The laser on my own bench in Denver is doing, faster, the same job a person with a fretsaw did for Parker Brothers a hundred years ago. I find that a strange and good kind of continuity to be standing in the middle of.

The old habits survived the whole journey. Modern wooden puzzles still hide shaped pieces in them, the ones Wikipedia describes as appearing "in recognisable shapes such as objects or animals, known as 'whimsies', 'silhouettes', or 'figurals'." The same idea Parker Brothers used in 1909 is in the puzzle on your table tonight. Opus Puzzles is part of that laser-era wave, and if you want to see where the craft sits now, our wooden puzzle collection is the current chapter of a very old story. You can read why we build them the way we do on our about page.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the first jigsaw puzzle made?

In the 1760s. The Victoria and Albert Museum credits the London mapmaker John Spilsbury with inventing the "dissected puzzle," a printed map glued onto wood and cut into pieces to teach children geography. The first jigsaw puzzles were wooden, not cardboard.

Were jigsaw puzzles originally made of wood or cardboard?

Wood. The earliest puzzles were cut from thin wood panels in the 1760s. As Britannica puts it, the puzzle picture was "originally attached to wood and later to paperboard." Cardboard did not take over until mass-produced die-cut puzzles arrived in the 1930s.

Why did cardboard puzzles replace wooden ones?

Price. A steel die stamps hundreds of cardboard puzzles an hour, while a person cuts one wooden puzzle by hand in a day. During the Great Depression, cheap die-cut cardboard puzzles let most Americans afford a puzzle, and cardboard became the mass-market standard.

Are wooden jigsaw puzzles still made today?

Yes. Wooden puzzles had a revival starting in 1974 with Stave Puzzles in Vermont, and laser cutting later helped make them affordable again. Modern wooden puzzles still include the shaped whimsy pieces that hand-cutters were making over a century ago.

So the wooden puzzle on your table is the original idea, the one that started in a schoolroom, boomed in a depression, got undercut by a machine, and quietly came back. Cardboard is just the chapter in the middle. If you would like to own a piece of the older story, take a look through our wooden puzzle collection, and when you finish one, here is how to frame it so it lasts.

Written by Simon I., Founder of Opus Puzzles, in Denver, Colorado. Published May 29, 2026. Last updated May 29, 2026.