Craquelure

About Craquelure

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.