Spin & Paint3D jigsaw puzzles on iPhone & iPad
A flat jigsaw cuts a picture into interlocking squares. A 3D jigsaw takes a sculpture apart along its own seams and asks you to put it back together — in the round, from any angle.
What makes it a 3D puzzle
A cardboard jigsaw is a picture that has been cut up. The cut is arbitrary — a grid of interlocking tabs laid over an image that had nothing to do with it.
A 3D jigsaw is different in kind. The model shatters along its own seams: the break follows the object's forms, so a piece is a shoulder, a horn, a section of jaw. Rebuilding it is less like assembling a grid and more like reassembling something that fell off a shelf.
And when the piece goes home, its color comes back with it. The finished sculpture is the artifact restored, which is the whole conceit of the app: a museum where the exhibits arrive broken and blank.
The controls
- Two fingers orbit and pinch-zoom the model. You will do this constantly — most of the empty slots are not facing you.
- Drag a piece from the tray along the bottom to its slot.
- The counter at the top shows how many of how many are placed.
- It saves itself. Close the app mid-piece and the board is waiting.
Choosing a piece count
| Pieces | Feels like | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 20–50 | A warm-up | A commute, a coffee, winding down |
| 50–150 | A proper sitting | An evening with something on |
| 150–300 | A project | Several sessions across a few days |
| Up to 500 | A long haul | A flight, a weekend, a stubborn mood |
The piece count is chosen per play, not per model, so the same artifact can be a ten-minute puzzle today and a 500-piece one next month.
Five tactics that make a big puzzle tractable
- Work one region at a time. Finish a head or a limb before moving on. Jumping around a sphere is how people lose their place.
- Sort by silhouette, not color. On a 3D model the shape of a piece tells you far more than its color does — an object's palette repeats, its geometry does not.
- Let the seams guide you. Because the break follows the form, a piece with a sharp curved edge belongs against another sharp curved edge. That is not true of cardboard.
- Spin more than feels necessary. The single most common stall is a tray full of pieces for a face you have not looked at yet.
- Stop at a natural break. There is no timer and no score, so the only cost of stopping is remembering where you were — and finishing a region removes even that.
Want it even simpler? Every puzzle can also be played by numbers — same pieces, same model, but every empty slot is numbered, so there is nothing to work out at all.
How many puzzles are there?
Over 250 models, across 42 halls — dragons, demons, idols, animals, robots, food, spaceships and spirits, sorted by category, style and difficulty. Every one of them can be played as a puzzle, as a by-numbers puzzle, or free-painted in 3D, so the catalogue is effectively three times its size.
Adventure mode adds a slower rhythm on top: it deals you one artifact a day, and the next is only drawn when you have restored the current one. The 42 halls fill in behind you as you go.
Playing without signal
Download a model once and it is on the device. The one thing to do in advance: open each puzzle once while you still have a connection, because the first open fetches the artifact's original colors — the target the rebuild is measured against. After that it plays in airplane mode like anything else. The offline guide has the full pre-flight checklist.
Take one apart, then put it back
Over 250 models, 20 to 500 pieces, and no ads between them. Free to download.
Free to download · iPhone & iPad · Works offline