Jigsaw game

Palapeli

There aren't many desktop games you can play at your own leisure, perhaps in between work or across days. Chess could almost work if you didn't have to cache your current position and your strategy in your brain before coming back to a game, and there are both text and graphical adventures with a very leisurely pace. But nothing quite matches a good old jigsaw. There's something about their simplicity and their level of distraction that can be very calming, and ironically, almost productive. Palapeli is a KDE-based desktop application that lets you solve a jigsaw puzzle from your desktop. You start a game by selecting an image from the installed collection. After doing this, the play space appears, littered with the jigsaw pieces you're going to need to fit together to reconstruct the image. There's lots of control over the appearance of the play space, and you can add 3D beveling to the pieces, drop-shadows, and replace the background, all of which we'd recommend for maximum legibility. You then drag pieces around to find the places where they fit, but you're free to use whatever strategy works best for you. When you get two fitting sides in close proximity, they'll snap together, but even this can be reconfigured.

By default, there's a clear area in the middle of the play space where you might start constructing edges, before moving them into position. At any time, you can select other pieces and rearrange them around the jigsaw, much as you would in real life. You can drag the play space with the right button and freely zoom in and out to get a better view. There's also an optional preview window to see the original image and a progress indicator. When you quit the application or go back to the image collection, your progress and play-space settings are automatically saved and restored again when you return.

Project Website

https://github.com/KDE/palapeli

As well as letting you solve built-in puzzles, you can use Palapeli to generate all kinds of new ones from many different piece shapes.