Twenty minutes in, the eight year old gives up, grandma complains she can't see a thing and only one adult is still sitting there. Anyone who has tried a family jigsaw has seen this film. It's rarely the people's fault. It's nearly always the puzzle, chosen with one person in mind when there are five at the table. Buying a jigsaw puzzle for the family calls for different thinking: a size that lets everyone reach the pieces, and a picture with work for every age.

How many pieces for four or five pairs of hands

A 500 piece puzzle finishes at about 48 x 34 cm. On a dining table, four people can reach it without elbowing each other. For one person alone it's a long afternoon; with the whole family, it's a Sunday afternoon with time left for tea.

A 1000 piece puzzle, 68 x 48 cm from Educa and 70 x 50 cm from Clementoni, needs several evenings. It works well on holiday, or in a home where the table can stay taken for a week and everyone drops by when they feel like it.

Anything bigger, as a family project, usually ends with one adult finishing the rest alone. We don't recommend it.

There's a third, less obvious option: two puzzles in one box. More on that just below.

Buying a family jigsaw puzzle: a picture with work for everyone

What makes a good family puzzle is a picture split into areas you can tell apart at a glance. That way, everyone takes their own patch and nobody ends up fighting over the same twenty pieces. Some examples from our shop, and how they tend to get divided:

• Educa's Illustrated Map of Europe, 500 pieces, full of monuments and symbols from each country. The younger ones hunt for the monuments they know, the adults deal with the sea around it, which is the dull part. And everyone finds out where Slovenia is.
• Educa's Inside Out 2, with two 500 piece puzzles in one box. Two teams, two pictures, one table. Kids know the characters by heart, and a bit of competition between teams keeps everyone in their seat.
• Happily's In the 90's, 1000 pieces, illustrated by Holly Maguire. It's a shop window of objects and toys from the 90s. Parents recognise everything and stop at every object they once had at home, children ask what on earth that is.
• Clementoni's More is More Travel & Cultures, a 1000 piece collage: Tutankhamun's mask, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, a London bus. Each cutting is an island with its own colours, perfect for sharing out.
• In December, Clementoni's Christmas Magic Moments, 500 pieces, a village square with carol singers, a lit tree and children building a snowman. It has small figures for anyone who likes hunting for details.

The boxes give minimum ages (10, 12 or 14 and up). That age assumes a child doing the puzzle alone. With adults at the table, a seven or eight year old is a real help with the brightly coloured areas.

More options in our puzzles up to 500 pieces and puzzles up to 1000 pieces collections.

House rules (so the puzzle gets finished in one piece)

They sound fussy, but they're the reason no piece is missing at the end.

1. Edges first, and whoever has the least patience does them. It's the part with the quickest result.
2. Each person takes one area of the picture and a tray or box lid for that area's pieces.
3. No pieces leave the table. A piece in a coat pocket is a piece lost until spring.
4. The last piece is drawn by lot at the start. It sounds trivial, but it prevents the only serious argument of the day.
5. If the family cat likes lying on paper, cover the table when nobody's there.

For tips on sorting pieces, we have a separate guide: techniques for doing puzzles easily.

When the puzzle isn't enough

In some families, part of the table couldn't care less about puzzles, or the puzzle needs a break after two hours. Family games solve both. UNO takes minutes to learn and works for 2 to 10 players aged 7 and up. DOS is UNO's cousin with two discard piles, for 2 to 4. For quiz lovers, Joker 2nd Edition is the board game of a Portuguese TV quiz show, with 2000 questions in Portuguese, for 2 to 8 players aged 12 and up; it's the one to pick if your family speaks Portuguese.

The full range is in our family games collection.

If everyone at home picks their own puzzle and you put them all in one order, the cart takes 5 € off from 5 puzzles and 10 € off from 8.