The geometric classics
The first family of tangram shapes is geometric: the square the seven tans are cut from, the big triangle, the rectangle, the parallelogram, and the trapezoid. These look like the easiest figures in the book and are reliably the ones that humble new players - a convex outline gives no corners away, so almost nothing about the dissection is forced.
Mathematicians proved in 1942 that the tans can form exactly thirteen convex polygons. Several of them are in our classics collection - start with the square, and expect it to take longer than you think.
Figures: boats, birds, and buildings
The second family is figurative - the silhouettes that made tangram famous. Classic sets and 19th-century puzzle books are full of boats with triangular sails, swans with bent necks, mountains, rockets, and houses, each one a recognizable picture built from the same seven pieces.
Figurative shapes tend to be friendlier than convex ones because their outlines leak information: a sail's tip must be a triangle point, a swan's neck constrains the parallelogram. That is why our easy tier leans figurative while the hard tier leans geometric and abstract.
Beyond the classics
Two hundred years of tangram books have accumulated thousands of recorded figures, and the supply is effectively endless - our generator builds new silhouettes from real dissections, so every puzzle it produces is guaranteed solvable with the seven tans.
If you want a structured path: learn on the easy tier with internal outlines shown, graduate to the daily puzzle, then come back and take on the convex classics.