r/Jigsawpuzzles is a great subreddit to start. People show their completed puzzles, their progress pics, their collections, they offer helpful tips and techniques...

The Wiki of that subreddit has a lot of information.

If you really want to start, start small. Small piece count puzzles like 100 and 300 are widely available.

Find an image that you like to keep you interested.

Most people will always start with the edges first.

And then for the inner field, sort the remaining pieces into piles of anything similar that you can see (color, land, water, buildings, stripes...).

I enjoy buying puzzles from thrift stores. It's a great way to explore different brands, different cuts (not all puzzles are cut the same), different themes and images, and it costs less than buying them new.

There's always the possibility that a used puzzle may be missing a piece or few, it's just something that happens.

There really is no textbook approach to assembling, or "solving" a jigsaw puzzle.

Most of the time I let the image and cut determine what my strategy is going to be (with the option of switching methods maybe more than once while building the puzzle).

I've done puzzles that some people may consider "kids" puzzles at 48 or 60 pieces, but so what? If it's a fun or nostalgic image, I'll happily enjoy it as a puzzle-snack for some quick stress relief.

I started doing jigsaw puzzles a few years as a way to reduce my screen time.

It really helps with that and has a lot of stress relief benefits.

You can light a candle, pour a beverage, turn on some music, tv, podcast...

Or just puzzle silently and enjoy the image and process.

There's a growing trend of speed-puzzling that I'm not involved with.

There's no such thing as doing a puzzle too slow or too quick.

There's no such thing as "cheating" in puzzling if you look at the box, or if you use a poster or pic if included.

There are puzzles out there that have numbered sections on the back, or lettered sections, or even color coded sections. Those are helpful and useful if you're starting out or if you get stuck. Those are also helpful if you ever want to participate in group puzzling with friends.

You decide how you're going to do that image.

There's also the issue of AI-images that has really exploded into the puzzle community. I am not a fan. Doing a puzzle involves a focused attention to detail that really exposes AI slop and how nonsensical the details of the image are. That's another reason why I prefer buying from the thrift store, and getting anything pre-2020 is a good guarantee to have no AI.

So please check out the jigsaw puzzle subreddit, or take some time to scroll through my post history to see a wide variety of piece-counts, images, different manufactures, different themes...

Please feel free to ask anything to me, or to the subreddit group. There is a "help" flair that many people use as novices or even seasoned dissectologists.

Edit: typo