Skip to content
Switzerland relief puzzle, seen at an angle
Drag to turn, scroll or pinch to zoom.

The printed plate

The Switzerland relief puzzle map with every canton lifted out and laid around the empty red frame

Every canton out, and the frame they came from.

23 piecesSwitzerland

Switzerland

Twenty-three cantons over the Alps

▶ Play it online

Switzerland is the country this workshop knows best and the hardest one to cut well: Genève is a fingernail, Graubünden is a third of the plate, and the half-cantons had to be merged to keep every piece pickable. The relief is what makes it: Valais and Graubünden are visibly mountain, the plateau between Zürich and Genève is visibly not, and the reason nearly everyone lives on that plateau needs no explaining once the plate is in front of you.

What a child works out

  • Where the Alps are and where the people are — and how those two facts relate.
  • Cantons are wildly different sizes, and that is the point of the system.
  • The big lakes sit on the seam between mountain and plateau.
CHF 15.00

A download, to print yourself

  • A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
  • One STL per piece, for any other slicer
  • A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
  • For your own use; the licence is in the download

What you need to print it

  • A build plate that takes 250 × 176 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
  • A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed

Printed it? Got an idea?

Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on Switzerland.

The plate

Pieces
23 pieces
Plate
250 × 176 mm

B5 — the size of a school exercise book.

Scale
1 mm ≈ 1.5 km

How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.

Vertical exaggeration
× 1.29

Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.

Thickness
8.8 mm
Smallest piece
113 mm²

Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.

Fit
0.35 mm clearance

Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.

Material
PLA, printed in Switzerland

Every named piece

  • Aargau
  • Appenzell
  • Basel
  • Bern
  • Fribourg
  • Genève
  • Glarus
  • Graubünden
  • Jura
  • Luzern
  • Neuchâtel
  • Schaffhausen
  • Schwyz
  • Solothurn
  • St Gallen
  • Thurgau
  • Ticino
  • Unterwalden
  • Uri
  • Valais
  • Vaud
  • Zug
  • Zürich

Zoom in, zoom out

A piece of each of these is the subject of the next one. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so it is a real map at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.

Follow the borders — World to continent to country to canton to city district

  1. Level 1
    The World1 mm ≈ 157 km
  2. Level 2
    Europe1 mm ≈ 24.7 km
  3. Level 3
    Switzerland1 mm ≈ 1.5 km
  4. Level 4
    Canton Zürich1 mm ≈ 305 m
  5. Level 5
    Zürich City1 mm ≈ 81 m

More from Countries & States

See all →
Europe relief puzzle map, 29 pieces

Europe

Forty-five countries at real elevation

The political map, printed on the terrain it was drawn over. Forty-five pieces, from Andorra to Russia's western edge.

Pieces
29 pieces
Scale
1 mm ≈ 24.7 km
Suitable for
Ages 6 and up
Price
CHF 15.00
The United States relief puzzle map, 46 pieces

The United States

The lower forty-eight, and two pieces you would not expect

Fifty pieces. The straight western borders and the crooked eastern ones, over the ground that explains both.

Pieces
46 pieces
Scale
1 mm ≈ 20.1 km
Suitable for
Ages 6 and up
Price
CHF 15.00
North America relief puzzle map, 6 pieces

North America

Nineteen countries, Panama to the Arctic

The continent as countries — including the Caribbean islands that are usually too small to cut.

Pieces
6 pieces
Scale
1 mm ≈ 49.3 km
Suitable for
Ages 6 and up
Price
CHF 15.00