Tangram

Each puzzle gives you a target silhouette. Drag, rotate and flip the seven geometric pieces until they cover the shape exactly, with no gaps and no overlaps. Pieces snap to a fine grid so precise fits lock cleanly into place.

• Drag a tan to reposition it
• Rotate pieces in 45-degree steps
• Flip the parallelogram (the only piece that flips)
• Overlapping or out-of-bounds pieces glow red until you fix them

• Desktop: drag with the mouse; press R or E to rotate, F to flip; Hint and Reset buttons available
• Phone & tablet: drag pieces with your finger; use on-screen rotate and flip buttons

• Daily: one fresh silhouette to solve each day
• Practice: pick from a library of puzzles across difficulty levels

• Place the two large triangles first, since they eat the most area
• Work corners and straight edges of the silhouette before the interior
• If a piece won't fit, try flipping the parallelogram, the only one that mirrors

The tangram is Chinese; the word for it may not be. Its origin is unclear, with one conjecture building it from the Greek element -gram, "that which is drawn", attached to a "tan-" element variously traced to Chinese t'an, "to extend", or Cantonese t'ang, "Chinese".

The rival explanation is that the word was already sitting in English. An archaic sense of "tangram" meant an odd, intricately contrived thing — which describes the puzzle well enough that it may simply have been borrowed.

Either way the first known use is traceable and surprisingly late: the 1848 book Geometrical Puzzle for the Young by the mathematician Thomas Hill, later president of Harvard. Hill probably coined the term, and certainly campaigned for it in a run of articles afterwards.

Tangram is an original free browser version of the ancient seven-piece dissection puzzle, a timeless spatial-reasoning challenge. Play instantly with no sign-up.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.