About Pieceware, the online jigsaw puzzle

Pieceware is a free online jigsaw puzzle you can solve together with other people, dressed up as a Windows XP desktop. It is made and run by Kyllian as a side project.

The name

Pieceware is "piece" plus "shareware", because the whole site is a love letter to the CD-ROMs that came taped to the front of computer magazines in 2001. It is shareware in the good sense only: every feature is unlocked, there is no registration key, no thirty-day timer and no nag screen. The address is still pieceware.app, which is where the XP part went.

Why it exists

Plenty of sites let you do a jigsaw in the browser, and a few let you do one with friends. Fewer let you do it without making an account, with pieces that rotate, with more than one piece shape, with a thousand-plus pieces, and with your own photo, all at once. That combination is what this site is for. The XP theme is because a puzzle on a blue desktop with a taskbar clock in the corner is a nicer place to spend an hour than most of the web, and because the person who built it was in front of that desktop when it was new.

What it does

• Multiplayer rooms with live cursors: make a lobby, share the link, everyone plays on the same board.
• Piece counts from 24 to 1500, three piece shapes (classic, twisted, square) and optional rotation.
• A catalog of public-domain and openly licensed pictures, plus your own uploads.
• A global puzzle the whole site solves together, all day.
• No accounts, no ads, no tracking. Details on the privacy page.

How it is built

The pages are static HTML. The game is a canvas drawn by plain TypeScript, talking to a small Node server over a WebSocket; the server is the referee for piece positions, so two players cannot disagree about where a piece is. Cursor positions and drags are sent as tiny binary packets, which is why it stays smooth on a phone connection. Rooms live in memory and are saved to disk every 30 seconds, so a restart does not lose a puzzle in progress. The theme is hand-written CSS, not a screenshot.

Pictures and credits

Every built-in picture is public domain or openly licensed, and its page lists the author, licence and a link to the source. If you own an image in the catalog and want it credited differently or removed, open an issue on the author's GitHub.

Contact

Bugs, ideas, a picture you would like to see in the catalog: GitHub is the fastest way to reach Kyllian.