Posted by Ali on 2nd December 2012
A reasonably gentle but very enjoyable offering from Hypnos with plenty of clue types on show and some nicely clued proper names. Favourite clue was 17A, which I only worked out as I was writing this up!
Posted in Independent | 3 Comments »
Posted by Pierre on 2nd December 2012
Perhaps a more tricky Everyman than usual, but I’m interested to know what others think …
Posted in Everyman | 9 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 2nd December 2012
We hadn’t done a Guardian Genius for a while, but did this one since I was down on the rota for doing a blog post on it. I’m very glad about this in retrospect – there was a lot to enjoy in this smart puzzle from Crucible. We thought this was slightly above the usual difficulty for a Genius, just because getting one pairing gave you no help with any of the others – there was no clear breakthrough point as you sometimes get with themed puzzles. Anyway, this was a very good puzzle, not even spoiled by by the final three clues being mangled on publication nor the mistake in 2 down.
Posted in Guardian Genius | 5 Comments »
Posted by Andrew on 2nd December 2012
The first thing that struck me about this puzzle was the unusually open grid, with wide open unbarred spaces, especially in the NE and SW corners. The two 13-letter across answers have only two unchecked letters each, instead of the more usual four. Just as remarkably, Azed has managed to fit in a generous helping of familiar (or a least reasonable-looking) words. Perhaps as a result of these two features, I found the puzzle very much at the easy end of the spectrum, almost finishing it without aids in about 40 minutes, and then needing just a little dictionary-hunting to finish off a few stragglers. The grid may be unusual, but the clueing is as sound and imganitive as ever.
Posted in Azed | 4 Comments »