On Strategy and Tactic, part 1

In speed puzzling, the most important thing is to maintain continuity in the assembly and keep up the pace. If something is not working, you need to adjust course quickly. At the highest level of speed puzzling, knowledge and skills are applied on a puzzle-by-puzzle basis, and decisions are made fast, sometimes in a matter of seconds. In an intense competition setting, a consciously chosen strategy and a toolbox of effective tactics help get the puzzle completed. Speed comes from choosing the right strategy to reduce unnecessary work and the effective use of tactics to make the assembly process flow smoothly.

Strategy is the overall plan for solving a particular puzzle as efficiently as possible.

Tactic is a method aimed at a specific area of the puzzle or a specific stage of assembly that helps get the pieces put together.

Often, strategy and tactics go hand in hand, or more accurately, tactics follow strategy: strategy helps you choose the right tactic for each situation.

The Most Common Strategies and Tactics

In speed puzzling, strategy determines the overall approach, the order of assembly, and the positioning of both the pieces and the puzzler(s). When you look at a puzzle, you might consider which sections seem easy or difficult for you, in other words, where it makes sense to start and how to proceed from there. You can also think about how to minimize hand movement during assembly, meaning where to place the pieces and yourself in relation to the build area at different stages. Positioning is especially important to plan when more than one person is involved: whether you sit side by side, at an angle, or opposite each other, where the pieces are placed, and in which direction the puzzle is built from different puzzlers’ perspectives can have a surprisingly large impact on the final result.

From the perspective of an individual competitor, optimizing your own movements is a key part of strategy, because often you touch the same piece several times, and that repetition adds up and shows in the total time. In speed puzzling, even a single second can decide the outcome of a competition, so even small optimizations are worthwhile. A strategic approach to assembling might, for example, aim to handle each piece only once or twice: pick up only pieces you can identify with certainty, and place them either directly in their correct position or together with other similar pieces in the same area.

The main purpose of space management is to bring clarity to the assembly process. The most common strategy is to place the flipped pieces at one end of the work area and assemble the puzzle in the area left empty. This makes it possible to search for needed pieces in one place, without having to move them out of the way of completed sections. There are other approaches as well: in the rainbow strategy, pieces are arranged in an arc and the puzzle is assembled inside the arc, while in the chaos strategy, pieces are spread evenly across the whole table and sections are assembled here and there among the loose pieces. The advantage of the rainbow strategy is that you can work with pieces close to yourself instead of constantly reaching far away, although this means you need to search for pieces from three different sides of the puzzle. The chaos strategy works well when the puzzle has clearly distinct small or medium-sized areas. It could, for example, be useful for collage puzzles.

Deciding the order of assembly is also a key strategic choice: where you start, where you move next, and what you leave for the final stage. Thus, for example, whether you assemble the edge first, midway through, or last is a strategic decision. The most common approaches are either to start with the edge pieces because of their distinctive shape, or with the most visually distinct and easiest section of the puzzle in order to build momentum. With an easy-to-hard strategy, the sections assembled early on become “anchors” to which other pieces can later be attached. This leads naturally into tactics. The anchor tactic described above is broadly applicable and works with most puzzles. An anchor might be, for example, the edge of a color block, a piece of text, the center of a flower, or the eyes in a face.

A parallel tactic to anchoring is island building, in which a complete area is assembled in its correct location. The difference between the two is that an anchor could be just a single eye, while an island would mean assembling the entire face. Expanding outward around anchors or islands is called sunbursting. Sunbursting is especially useful with difficult puzzles, because the shape of the pieces can then be used to support assembly, and finding pieces that connect to already assembled areas is easier than building from nothing.

Various sorting tactics also support the assembly process. These include sorting by shape, color, texture, and categories, such as all teacups or all sky pieces. The reference image can also be used in different ways during assembly. For example, in the pick & place tactic, individual pieces are identified and placed with the help of the box image.

There are also specific tactics for avoiding loss of momentum or coming to a standstill. If the area you are working on is not progressing, you can define a switch tactic for yourself and apply it as soon as your pace begins to slow. In a switch tactic, you decide on a specific limit, for example, if a piece does not fit after a couple of quick attempts, you must move on to another area. You can work on something else for a while and then return to the pieces you were working on earlier. Quite often, the assembly goes noticeably better than before once your brain has had time to process the earlier area in the background. At the strategic level, the key decision is when to use which tactic. In terms of maintaining speed, flexibility is essential to strategy: reassessing your choices and switching tactics on the fly.

Finally, this can be summed up as follows:

Strategy is the application of knowledge, that is, the choice of what you do next and why.

Tactic is the application of skill, that is, it defines how you do it.

Strategy grows out of understanding your own strengths and areas for development, as well as different puzzle images and cut patterns, while tactics are learned techniques and operating models.

Speed improves most when strategy succeeds in reducing uncertainty and tactical execution succeeds in reducing friction.

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This article draws on the excellent Terminology Tuesday Instagram post series by Mari Black and Jim Eakins. Jim and Mari are pioneers of speed puzzling, both in developing and articulating the terminology and in advancing assembly techniques, and they are, for example, credited with developing the term sunbursting.