What Are Whimsy Pieces in a Wooden Puzzle?

By Simon I., Founder of Opus Puzzles. Published May 26, 2026.

A whimsy piece is a puzzle piece cut into a recognizable shape instead of the standard interlocking blob. A tiny fox. A leaf. A sailboat. A star. It locks into the puzzle like any other piece, but its outline is a little picture. In a wooden jigsaw you might find one whimsy piece, or you might find thirty, scattered through the grid and themed to the design.

I want to be honest about how I learned to take these seriously, because for a while I didn't. When we started Opus Puzzles, I wrote up whimsy pieces the way every puzzle box does. A decorative bonus. A nice little extra, parked near the bottom of the product page under the piece count. I treated them as garnish for the better part of a year. Then the customer emails started landing, and almost none of them mentioned the finished picture. They mentioned the moment they flipped a piece over and there was a rabbit. Or a little key. Or a piece cut into the first letter of their kid's name. The whimsy pieces were what people remembered. I'd been burying the best thing about our puzzles at the bottom of the page.

What Is a Whimsy Piece, Exactly?

People ask me this in person and I always answer the same way. Picture an ordinary jigsaw. Every piece is basically the same shape, a little rectangle with knobs and holes, a few hundred near-twins of each other. A whimsy piece is the one that breaks rank. We draw an actual object, a fox, a teapot, whatever suits the scene, and cut the piece along that line. It still has to lock to its neighbors, mind you. That part gets no special treatment. As Wikipedia's jigsaw puzzle entry puts it, wooden puzzles "sometimes include pieces in recognisable shapes such as objects or animals, known as 'whimsies', 'silhouettes', or 'figurals'." We just say whimsy. The shape always chases the picture. A woodland design hides foxes and acorns. A seaside one hides anchors and shells.

Where Did Whimsy Pieces Come From?

This is the part I find genuinely cool. Whimsy pieces are old. Properly old.

The jigsaw itself started life as a wooden object in the 1760s. The Victoria and Albert Museum credits the first "dissected puzzle" to a London mapmaker named John Spilsbury, who glued a printed map onto a thin sheet of wood and cut along the country borders. That was the whole product. A teaching tool for kids. Plain shapes, no whimsy yet.

Figure pieces showed up properly with the brand I keep coming back to in these histories. Parker Brothers launched their Pastime line of wooden jigsaws in 1908 and ran it through to 1958. According to Wikipedia's article on Pastime Puzzles, 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. That ratio has barely moved in more than a century. Open one of our larger puzzles today and you will find something close to it. Twelve little animals or objects in every hundred pieces, give or take.

The same Wikipedia article tells you how hot the demand got. The Pastime cutter team grew "from around two dozen puzzle cutters in 1927 to more than 100 cutters in the early 1930s." A hundred people, with fretsaws, hand-cutting the figure pieces and the standard pieces both. The Great Depression hit, families were broke, and the puzzle company was hiring. Wooden jigsaws with little hand-cut foxes in them were the cheap escape.

And then almost immediately, the figure piece nearly died. The Strong National Museum of Play records how, in those same Depression years, the steel die arrived. 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." Cheap won. A die can stamp out hundreds of cardboard puzzles in an hour, but a die has no imagination. It can only cut the one boring interlocking blob over and over. So as cardboard took over the mass market, the figure piece quietly vanished from the average box on the average store shelf.

It didn't vanish completely, just from the cheap puzzle. In 1974, a guy named Steve Richardson in Vermont got an unusual phone call. According to Wikipedia's article on Stave Puzzles, "Richardson was offered US$300 to make a wooden jigsaw puzzle." Three hundred dollars, in 1974 money, for a single puzzle. A serious sum. He and his friend Dave Tibbetts started Stave Puzzles in Norwich, Vermont, and today Wikipedia calls Stave "the largest hand-cut jigsaw puzzle company in the United States." The figure piece had a quiet comeback in their workshop, and a wave of laser-cutting shops followed in the decades since. Opus Puzzles is in that wave.

So when you turn over a little wooden fox on your table tonight, you are holding an idea more than a hundred years old. Dropped on its head by cardboard. Brought back one workshop at a time. And figure pieces, as Wikipedia notes, "are still found in modern hand-cut and laser-cut wooden puzzle brands."

Why Can't a Cardboard Puzzle Have Whimsy Pieces?

This is the honest line between the two kinds of puzzle, and it comes down to one tool. A cardboard jigsaw gets cut by a steel die. One fixed stamp slams down, and every piece drops out at once. Fast, cheap, and that is exactly why cardboard puzzles took over the mass market in the 1930s, as the Strong National Museum of Play records. The catch is that a die only ever cuts the one pattern it was machined as. You could in theory build a die with little fox-shaped holes in it, but you would need a brand-new die for every design and every figure, which kills the cheap-and-fast math that made cardboard win in the first place. A wooden puzzle is a different animal. We cut it with a laser, one line at a time, so if I draw a fox the laser just goes and cuts a fox. That freedom is the entire reason whimsy pieces are practical at all on wood, and not on cardboard. You can see how the rest of that trade-off shakes out across our wooden puzzle collection.

How Are Whimsy Pieces Cut?

Our puzzles start as a flat sheet of basswood plywood, 4mm thick. People ask why basswood and not something fancier, and my honest answer is that fancier would be worse. The Wood Database calls basswood "very soft and light" with a "fine, even texture," and gives it a low Janka hardness of 410 lbf. Soft and even is the dream when a laser has to swing around a tight curve. The ears on a rabbit the size of your thumbnail, cut clean, edges crisp, with minimal scorch. We draw the whimsy shapes before we lock the cutting pattern, never after. Each one still has to interlock with whatever sits beside it. So a whimsy piece is a small puzzle for us first, long before it is ever a small puzzle for you.

Finding Whimsies: What It's Actually Like

The brochure version of a whimsy piece is short. You pour out the box, the recognizable shapes catch your eye, you put them in, you smile. The real version is messier and better.

I will start with the time I cut a whimsy wrong. We were designing the first batch of an autumn deer puzzle and I drew an acorn that was a little too round on one side. It came out of the laser cleanly, perfect cap, perfect curve, and it did not lock into anything. Not its top neighbor, not its left. The interlock geometry on a whimsy is unforgiving. The cute outline has to also be a valid puzzle piece, every bump and notch in the right place to grip the four pieces around it. I redrew that acorn maybe ten times before the cap was right and the lock held. Whimsy pieces are not garnish from the cutter's side of the table. They are the hardest pieces in the puzzle to design.

What customers do with them once they have them is the other half of the story. A woman wrote to us about the Autumn Stag wooden puzzle, the one with the acorn that gave me so much trouble. She built it with her two boys over a long Saturday and made a rule. Nobody places a whimsy piece until the very end. She wanted the puzzle to come together as one ordinary grid of trees and antlers first, and then the boys took turns placing the little woodland shapes in last, like decorating a cake. She told me it was the only puzzle her younger one had ever sat through to completion.

Other customers do the exact opposite. They hunt for the whimsies first, line them up in a little row at the top of the table like trophies, and then build the rest of the puzzle around them. I have watched two of my friends race each other to a fox on a coffee table. The fox always wins, in the sense that one of them grabs it within thirty seconds and the other has to settle for a second-place leaf.

Either way, the whimsy piece is doing the same thing. It is turning the build from "finish this picture" into "find this little family of objects." Which, honestly, is the whole reason we still cut them.

Do Whimsy Pieces Make a Puzzle Harder or Easier?

Both, honestly, and that is the fun of it. A whimsy piece is the easiest piece in the whole box to find. It is the only fox in a pile of ordinary shapes, so your eye lands on it right away. Place it, and it turns into a landmark. The pieces around it suddenly get easier to read. So whimsies hand you small, steady wins all the way through a long build. Then there is the hunt going the other direction. Plenty of our customers save the whimsy pieces for last, on purpose, like dessert. Some race a partner to spot them first. A puzzle with whimsy pieces is just a slightly different evening from a plain one. Part jigsaw, part treasure hunt.

Whimsy Piece vs Standard Piece: A Side-by-Side Look

The difference, side by side:

What Whimsy Pieces Will You Find in an Opus Puzzle?

Every design in our range hides its own themed set, cut to match the picture. The animal designs in our animal puzzle collection tuck creatures and leaves right into the artwork. The Autumn Stag wooden puzzle hides acorns and small woodland shapes among the trees. A holiday design hides bells and stars instead. We don't print a checklist of what is inside, and that is on purpose, because the finding is the whole point. If you want the longer story of how and why we build our puzzles this way, our about page covers it, and our FAQ page handles the common questions on sizes and materials.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do all wooden puzzles have whimsy pieces?

Not all of them, but most good ones do. Whimsy pieces are one of the main reasons people pick a wooden puzzle over cardboard, so makers who cut with a laser or a saw tend to include them. Every Opus Puzzles design has its own set.

How many whimsy pieces are in an Opus Puzzles puzzle?

It varies by design and size. As a rough guide, the historic Pastime puzzles ran about 12 figure pieces per 100 pieces, and that ratio still feels about right. A larger puzzle hides more of them.

Are whimsy pieces harder to place than normal pieces?

They're usually easier. A whimsy piece has a one-of-a-kind shape, so it stands out in the pile and usually has one clear spot it belongs. The fun is in spotting it, not in struggling with it.

Are whimsy pieces good for children?

Yes. Kids often hunt for the whimsy pieces first, because the shapes are easy to recognize and fun to collect. The pieces are 4mm basswood plywood, so they hold up well to small hands.

Whimsy pieces are the small, shaped pieces that turn a wooden jigsaw into something closer to a handmade object than a printed product. They carry a tradition over a century old, they can't be stamped out of cardboard, and they make the build feel like a hunt. Find them all in our wooden puzzle collection.

Written by Simon I., Founder of Opus Puzzles, in Denver, Colorado. Published May 26, 2026. Last updated May 26, 2026.