Before I solved 11ac it was hard to cope with all those clues that referred to it, but fairly soon that was all right, and there were no terribly obscure 11s. Although most of this nice crossword was easy enough, 1dn seems odd, I had never heard of the answer to 21dn, and 26dn still defeats me (although I’ll have looked it up by the time I’ve written the blog. _A_E is I suspect the skeleton of this type with most possibilities). Read the rest of this entry »

Fairly easy, pleasant puzzle today. I was briefly held up in the NE corner, I thought COLOGNE and BETEL were cleverly clued and it didn’t help to not know the two Lancs towns (which I got in the end, through guessing + Google).

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*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition.

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As ever, a very enjoyable puzzle from Pasquale. There were quite a few here where I had to guess that a word existed and then look it up (CERE, MANA, PICKABACK), but the wordplay in each case was quite clear with a few crossing letters.

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Oddly, my previous blog, and my final blog for the Inquisitor series, IQ 128, was an Obtrox puzzle. More oddly, it used exactly the same device: two extra letters from the wordplay in each clue of one set making up a quotation, the other set being normal. The only difference was that the two sets were the opposite way around.

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Wow! Tremendous stuff from Loda! A puzzle with 20  across and 20 down clues where all the answers were 6 letter words corresponding to the balls in an over, using vowels as scoring shots and W’s as wickets. Quite amazing.

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