📐 Tangram
🧩 Logic · 0 playsTangram
Seven ancient pieces, one silhouette, and no piece left over.
About Tangram
The tangram is a dissection puzzle some two centuries old: seven flat pieces — five triangles, a square and a parallelogram — that assemble into an endless variety of silhouettes. Each round presents one outline, and all seven pieces must fill it exactly, with rotation allowed and, for the parallelogram alone, a flip. The difficulty is perceptual rather than logical; the eye insists on seeing the figure whole while the solution requires decomposing it into triangles and edges. Placing the two large triangles first, since so few positions can hold them, is the tanagram habit worth forming early.
How to Play
Drag each of the seven pieces into the outline. Tap a piece to rotate it by 45 degrees; double-tap the parallelogram to flip it over. The figure is complete when all seven pieces sit inside the silhouette with no gaps and no overlaps.
💡 Tips & Strategy
Place the two large triangles first. Together they cover half the silhouette, and most outlines admit only one or two positions for them — usually anchored on the figure's longest straight edge or largest right angle. Everything else fits around them, and an outline that defeats you usually does so because the large triangles are wrong, not the small pieces.
Read the outline's edges for calibration. Tangram edges come in only a few lengths, and a long unbroken line on the silhouette must be assembled from specific combinations — the square's side, a triangle's hypotenuse. A 45-degree notch or a small square protrusion names its piece almost aloud.
Save the parallelogram for the awkward corner, and remember it is the only piece that has a handedness: if it stubbornly refuses a slot it visually fits, flip it. The medium triangle is the piece most often squandered early in a spot where the two small triangles were needed as a pair.
When the last piece will not fit, resist rearranging the small pieces endlessly — the misfit is usually upstream. Lift the medium triangle or a large one and try its alternate position. And practise seeing the square as two small triangles and the large triangle as two mediums; most silhouettes have regions that can be tiled two ways, and fluency in these exchanges is what makes the difference on the harder figures.