Tessera is a free online tangram puzzle — a seven-piece shape-fitting game you play in the browser with no download. Seven colourful geometric pieces start scattered around the edges of the canvas. Your goal: drag and rotate all seven pieces so their combined outline matches the grey silhouette target drawn on the canvas.
Drag pieces into the silhouette to form the target shape. When all 7 pieces are inside, the puzzle checks for a match. Click a placed piece to rotate it 90 degrees clockwise — or hold Shift and click to rotate in 45-degree steps. When you drop a piece, it snaps decisively to the nearest tangram lattice point and locks to the nearest 45° rotation; this snap is for alignment only, not to indicate correctness. The puzzle is solved when the union of all pieces matches the silhouette — any rotation or reflection is accepted. Solve faster for a higher score.
The fastest solves in Tessera start with the two large triangles. Together they account for half of every silhouette's area, so locking them down first removes most of the ambiguity from the rest of the layout. Look for the longest straight edge in the target shape — that edge is almost always one of the large triangles' hypotenuses sitting flush against the silhouette border. Place the second large triangle along the other dominant edge or corner, and the remaining five pieces usually have only one sensible arrangement left.
Treat the square and medium triangle as interior anchors. The square only fits at 0° or 45°, so a right-angled pocket in the silhouette is almost always where it lives. The medium triangle's hypotenuse is the same length as a large triangle's leg, so the two often meet edge-to-edge. Save the parallelogram for last — it is the only piece that needs flipping, and you will know it has to be flipped when every rotation of the un-flipped version leaves a wedge-shaped gap. If you get stuck, the Hint button outlines the next piece for two seconds at a fifty-point cost; sparing use on harder silhouettes is a fair trade.
Tangrams have been around for roughly two centuries, and you can find dozens of digital takes on the seven-piece dissection. Tessera's twist is permissiveness. Instead of demanding a single canonical solution, the win check accepts any rotation or reflection of the silhouette — once the union of your seven pieces matches the target outline, the puzzle is solved. That removes the frustration of having the "right" answer rejected because you mirrored it.
Snapping is the other deliberate departure. When you drop a piece it locks to the nearest tangram lattice point and rounds to the nearest 45° rotation, so you never wrestle with sub-pixel alignment. The snap is purely an input aid, not a correctness signal — every piece stays movable until the silhouette is filled, letting you experiment without feeling locked out of your own board.
If you enjoy this style of spatial puzzle, Hanjie applies the same calm pacing to a logic-grid format, and Conduit swaps polygons for coloured paths you draw between endpoints. Browse the full games library for more single-screen puzzles in the same relaxed register. If you're looking for tangram puzzles to play online without a download, Tessera's eighteen silhouettes run the full beginner-to-expert range.
Every solve is graded on a single dimension: elapsed time. The formula is score = clamp(round((300 - elapsed_seconds) / 3), 0, 100), which means a five-second solve scores 98, a thirty-second solve scores 90, a ninety-second solve scores 70, and anything past five minutes scores zero. Using a hint subtracts fifty points before the clamp, so a hinted ninety-second solve lands around 20 instead of 70.
The Daily Challenge submits scores to the same leaderboard as Free Play, so comparing daily runs across players is a head-to-head race on the same silhouette. Your best time per puzzle is saved in local storage, and the puzzle gallery beneath the canvas marks every cell with a status dot — grey for unsolved, green for solved, and gold for a near-perfect time. Streaks are tracked locally on consecutive daily completions; the count resets if you skip a calendar day.
Tessera ships with eighteen hand-authored silhouettes across a deliberate difficulty curve. Warm-ups like Square, Triangle, Arrow, and Mountain carry sixty-second targets and teach how each piece rotates and snaps. Mid-tier shapes — Candle, Rocket, House, Boat, Fish, Cat, Fox, and Tree — sit at ninety seconds and start hiding pieces in less obvious orientations. The toughest puzzles, Rabbit, Horse, Swan, Bird, Crab, and Person, allow two minutes and often require the parallelogram flipped or the small triangles wedged into narrow extremities.
Every silhouette is a verified, non-overlapping seven-piece dissection; the runtime validator re-checks each puzzle on page load, so a layout in the gallery is guaranteed to have at least one valid solution. Click any cell in the gallery beneath the canvas to load that puzzle in Free Play, or tap Daily for today's deterministic challenge.
