WASGIJ Puzzles – Back To…A 14th Century Castle

A few months back, my wife and I randomly decided to by a jigsaw.  She had read that doing jigsaw puzzles was a good way to tackle anxiety (of which we both suffer) by giving our minds something to focus on plus we both loved putting them together as kids and figured this was something we could do together – I’m a videogamer and she isn’t (aside from games like Sonic The Hedgehog and Crash Bandicoot).  We are like chalk and cheese – I’m a geek and she isn’t.  So anyway, we bought ‘Back to…A 14th Century Castle’ from The Works – at the time, they were doing a 25% cashback deal on TopCashback (their cashback rates are pretty generous plus they always have discount codes and other incentives).

We’d never seen one of these puzzles before and didn’t really pay much attention to the box.  We settled down for the evening to make a start on it and, after a short while, started to think the pieces were wrong as nothing seemed to match the box.  This was a proper ‘derp’ moment as, if we had read the box to begin with instead of an hour in, we would have realised that the box only provided scant clues as to solving it as the box image depicted the modern day look and you have to figure out what it’d look like back in the era in which it was set.

Now, we always start by finding the edges and completing the outer part first – how people do it from the middle out I do not know – but some of the pieces looked like they fit perfectly but they were in the wrong place.  After a reshuffle, we practically reversed the entire top edge to accommodate the rest of the puzzle.  The puzzle took us five nights – we typically started when the kids went to bed and did a few hours before we headed up too.

We did the puzzle on our coffee table and put a blanket over it when we were done to stop a) the cats getting at the pieces and b) our youngest, Georgia,  from wrecking it.  It worked fairly well but it wasn’t perfect.  The relief of being able to box it up and put it away once it was completed was incredible.

In regards to the anxiety reduction, I found it made me more anxious as the puzzle felt impossible at times and doing it at the coffee table really killed my back and my legs.  I was off work with depression and anxiety at the time and my body was already struggling but, all in all, I did enjoy doing the puzzle.

Since completing the puzzle, we have bought a number of others – a Minion Impossible puzzle and a Trolls one too and, most recently, some more WASGIJ puzzles that were on offer – ‘Back To…Barbers and Beehives?’ and the ’20th Party Parade’ which comes with another 1000 piece puzzle free.

We completed the ‘Back To…Barbers and Beehives?’ last night so I’ll do a separate post on that soon.

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