Lost Canvas

Lost Canvas is a jigsaw puzzle for people who like paintings. Forty-three of them — Monet, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Hokusai, Klimt, Botticelli, Goya, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Velázquez — cut into hexagons and taken apart. Put one back together and it is framed, hung on the wall of your gallery, and the room walks you on to the next one. There are two ways a painting comes apart. TURNING. Every hexagon is already in its right place and the wrong way up. Tap one to rotate it a sixth of a turn, until its brushwork runs into its neighbours'. A piece the edge of the painting crosses tells you which way is up; a piece in the middle of a sky tells you nothing, and those are the ones worth saving until last. CLUSTERING. The painting is cut into clumps of hexagons, laid out along a strip beside the board. Drag each one to where it belongs. A cluster that fits a hole is not always the cluster that belongs in it, and finding out is the game. The wall alternates between the two, and both grow: eight pieces in the first painting, seventy-four in the last. No timer. No score. No lives, no energy, nothing to wait for and nothing to buy. Hold the Peek button and the finished painting shows through for as long as you hold it. Pinch to look closely at the brushwork. Put a painting down half done and it will be exactly where you left it. A plaque under each one says what it is, who painted it and when. Every painting is a photograph of a real work in a real collection, taken from Wikimedia Commons, and every one is credited with its source and its licence on the About page inside the app. The piano is real too: eight recordings of Bach, Handel, Beethoven and Chopin, six of them licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their pianist, all of them named in the app. Plays on iPhone, iPad and Mac, upright or on its side, and the layout is drawn for each rather than stretched to fit. No advertising. No in-app purchases. No account and no login. Nothing you do in the game is shared with anyone, and the whole of it plays with no connection at all.