Relaxation 101

The puzzle fanatics amongst you will love site where you can tackle a wide variety of jigsaws and don't have to concern yourself with untangling a sea of messy pieces first. What's not to like?

‘How much time do you have?’ is one of the first questions posed to visitors to JigZone.com and it is an incredibly pertinent one under the circumstances because if one is so inclined, one can end up spending a helluva lot of time sampling everything the site has to offer.

Because I am writing an article about the website, I was obliged to spend some time seeing what exactly was in store, but subsequently found myself having to drag myself away from it many, many hours minutes (honest, boss) later when I realised that I still had a half a day’s work left to do.

As you may have gleaned from the website’s name, it is home to a series of jigsaw puzzles of varying difficulties and not, unfortunately for Irish dancing fans, as a home for multiple videos and tutorials on how best to master those Riverdance-like jigs and reels.

Jigsaw puzzles may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but unlike today’s privileged youth, children from the pre-smartphone generation weren’t as flush with options when it came to procrastinating and tackling a 500 or 1000-piece jigsaw was often a decent way of filling a rainy summer’s day when we got tired of building forts out of grubby couch cushions.

If you’re one of those who want to revisit those gloriously exciting days of youth and don’t want to deal with having to untangle and tidy up hundreds of jagged jigsaw pieces, then Jigzone will be right up your street, with everything from six-piece puzzles that will, or at least should, only take a matter of seconds to 247-piece monsters that could feasibly take a few hours to complete. Simply click on the pieces and drag them where where you want to go to complete the puzzle.

I love it when a puzzle comes together

The site isn’t much too look at, but if you’re visiting a website to solve puzzles, its aesthetic qualities won’t be of the highest priority, while there are loads of different categories – animals, sports, travel, semi-naked women (unfortunately, that one doesn’t actually exist) to keep a visitor entertained.

You can also upload your own pictures and make them into puzzles, put puzzles into your own web pages and blogs, compete against your friends to see who can solve a puzzle the fastest and even send a puzzle postcard if you’re into that sort of thing and if you’re on the website in the first place, you probably are.

Completing a puzzle without having to put the pieces together might not appeal to the jigsaw purists (of which we're sure there are many) out there, but if it's convenience and variety you're after, there are worse places to while away a couple of hours.