Inside the app
A closer look.
About this app
Made for a clear purpose.
Craquelure is a jigsaw puzzle built around 730 genuine works of art, every one of them released to the public domain by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Not stock photographs. Not AI images. Actual museum scans of actual objects, each one bundled at full working resolution and each one carrying its real catalogue record — artist, date, medium, collection, accession number.
TWELVE ROOMS
The collection is arranged the way a museum is, by room:
Dutch Golden Age · Ukiyo-e · Botanical Plates · Maps & Views · Mughal & Persian · Ink & Scroll · Impressionism & After · The American Wing · Old Masters · Master Drawings · Early Photographs · Pattern & Ornament
Seventeenth-century Dutch interiors. Hokusai and Hiroshige. Engraved flora from the great herbals. Sea charts drawn before anyone had seen the coast from above. Jewelled folios from Persian manuscripts. Hudson River School landscapes. Silver prints from the first century of photography. And an entire room of textile and ornament plates with no horizon and no focal point, for people who think they are good at this.
THE CUT
Choose anything from a twelve-piece warm-up to a two-thousand-piece afternoon. Two cut families: Classic, the traditional knob-and-socket die cut, and Organic, hand-cut lobes with no repeated shape, where you have to read the picture instead of the outline.
Pieces have weight. They lag a little under your finger, carry momentum when you flick them, and land with a wooden knock when they seat. Two loose pieces that belong together snap into a block you can then drag as one — the way a real jigsaw actually works.
Sort the tray by edges, by corners, or by colour. Toggle the ghost outline. Pinch to zoom right into the brushwork. Take a hint when you are stuck.
THE CRAQUELURE
As the picture comes together, the varnish crack network resolves across the seams. It is a real shader driven by your progress, and it is the reason the app is called what it is called.
WHAT YOU GET FOR FINISHING
Every completed work is acquired for a personal museum you arrange yourself — choose the frame, choose the wall colour, hang them where you want.
And the label unlocks. Not marketing copy: the Museum's own record for that object, plus a measured reading of the picture itself — where its colour intensity sits against the rest of the collection, where its local contrast sits, the five commonest colours in the scan, and the subject terms the Museum files it under. It is the only jigsaw that leaves you knowing something.
DEPTH, IF YOU WANT IT
Five opt-in conditions raise the difficulty and the payout: rotation, no outline, monochrome preview, a par time, or no reference image at all. Thirty-seven awards across scale, volume, craft and curation. Twelve curator ranks from Visitor to Director. And a new themed acquisition of six works every week, chosen by the calendar, identical for everyone, with no server involved.
HOW IT IS BUILT
One purchase. That is the whole transaction.
· No advertising, ever · No in-app purchases · No subscription · No account, no sign-in, no email · No network connection — the app never opens a socket · No analytics, no tracking, no data collection of any kind · Everything is on the device the moment you install it, including on a plane
Every image is public domain (CC0). Every sound, every piece of music, every crack network, every piece shape and the icon itself were generated for this app. Full source attribution ships with the game.
