Comments on: Independent 7680 / Nestor (Prize Puzzle Sat. 28th May)

By: caretman

caretman — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 15:21:25 +0000

Thanks, nmsindy, that was the answer I suspected since it appears online with the cheat features available. I was just holding out hope that maybe there was a different web address for the prize puzzles. But no worries, I’ll just do them when they become available.

By: nmsindy

nmsindy — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:36:23 +0000

caretman at #2, the policy of putting Sat (and also Sun) puzzles on the Indy website exactly one week late (ie on the date the solution appears in the paper) was fairly recently adopted and the blogs are timed to go up on those days, I believe.

By: caretman

caretman — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 01:28:11 +0000

I started this off like gangbusters; the first five clues I looked at all went in straight away. But the right side of the puzzle stymied me for a while. I got there in the end, but it took some work. DIAZ and ZEAL were my last couple in, and I needed to 14a to confirm that WESTLIFE (gotten solely from the wordplay) was really the name of a band. I really liked 14a, 16a, and 28a, and happy that I could work out the answers in 22a, 25a, and 15d from the elements. And that’s a tribute to Nestor, for providing a perfectly fair but intricate puzzle. Much fun! Thanks, Gaufrid, for the blog.

The Indy prize puzzle seems to show up on the website a week after it appears in print, so in this case Gaufrid’s blog appeared around the same time that I could see the puzzle on the website. Is there a way to see the current prize puzzle? I’m not complaining if not, since I can do these puzzles for free and am thrilled that the Indy is making its puzzles available this way. Being on foreign shores, I am lucky to have access to such high quality puzzles on a regular basis.

By: Allan_C

Allan_C — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 23:27:19 +0000

Thanks, Nestor, for a puzzle which I would agree with Gaufrid was neither the easiest nor the hardest of prize puzzles. Some great clues, quite a few of which took some working out even after getting the answers.

The SW corner proved a bit slow, LIKE STINK, GLAM and WESTLIFE being the last to go in. Also, after seeing J, K, X and Z, I was diverted into looking for a pangram.

Favourites possibly DETACHED and GENTRIFICATION but difficult to choose.