Posted by mhl on 25th May 2013
Not long after Araucaria’s Wagner / Verdi themed bank holiday special, we have a high quality Wagner / Poulenc themed puzzle from Crucible, timed close to the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth, which was on Wednesday. We found this rather tough, largely due to missing Poulenc knowledge and some tough clues like 1a. However, there was lots of entertainment along the way – a very nice puzzle overall.
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Posted in Guardian | 14 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 27th April 2013
Apologies for the late post – we didn’t complete this last Saturday morning, and I managed to forget that I was meant to be writing a post about it. Anyway, we found this difficult, but it’s a high quality crossword with lots of lovely clues. There’s a theme of the 60th anniversary of Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA. The rubric, with clue answers substituted, reads:
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Posted in Guardian | 21 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 2nd March 2013
A very entertaining prize crossword from Paul, including a hilarious homonym (sort of :)) for a famous nonsense word.
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Posted in Guardian | 21 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 2nd February 2013
I make this Philistine’s first prize puzzle, and their twelfth puzzle overall in the Guardian. This was a good fun puzzle to solve – with the odd exception (1a, 17d) I thought this was a fairly easy. (I was away that weekend, and Jenny and I both solved it completely without each other’s help, whereas I suspect with many prize puzzles one or other of us would have struggled.) My favourite clue was 8 down.
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Posted in Guardian | 26 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 5th January 2013
It’s always nice to have a crossword from Paul to post about, and I nowadays only get that chance when he occasionally gets a prize puzzle slot. We found this a satisfying solve, which didn’t present too many problems (although we’re not sure about 24d). I particularly enjoyed the linked clues 14,28; 2,1 and 27,10.
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Posted in Guardian | 17 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 8th December 2012
An excellent puzzle: cleverly constructed and with about the right level of difficulty for a Saturday, we thought. The rubric for this puzzle read “Across solutions are 11, when it comes to the subsidiary part of their clues”
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Posted in Guardian | 24 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.
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Posted in Guardian Genius | 5 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 10th November 2012
A fun prize puzzle from Araucaria, with a mini theme of writers.
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Posted in Guardian | 28 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 13th October 2012
We thought this was a pretty tough prize puzzle, in the context of those from the previous few weeks. That was probably largely due to a theme that was difficult for us, and (I’d assume) many other people of my age or younger. It was quite a fun struggle to solve, nonetheless.
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Posted in Guardian | 25 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 15th September 2012
A fun prize puzzle from Araucaria – we found this pretty easy apart from the the bottom right corner, which took another look a few days later to finish it off. There’s a mini-theme based around 9 across (FORGE), but no other special features I could spot.
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Posted in Guardian | 27 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 18th August 2012
We found this a difficult prize puzzle – it’s themed around the words “course” and “set”, both of which have many synonyms. (I seem to remember reading once that “set” is the word in the OED with the largest number of different definitions.)
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Posted in Guardian | 27 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 21st July 2012
Apologies for the late post on this puzzle – as a result, I won’t waste time in saying much beyond that this was a lovely prize puzzle from Paul with lots of enjoyable clues.
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Posted in Guardian | 15 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 23rd June 2012
A very enjoyable prize puzzle from Araucaria, with a mini-theme based on 27a (also my favourite clue in the puzzle). There were a couple here I needed to Google to be able to parse (13a and 5d), but otherwise we didn’t find this too difficult.
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Posted in Guardian | 30 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 4th June 2012
As is typical of Puck’s puzzles, this challenging Genius has lots of satisfying and intricate wordplay. The across clues are all of the DLM (Definition and Letter Mixture) type, which neither of us are particularly used to, but are fun to solve.
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Posted in Guardian Genius | 6 Comments »
Posted by mhl on 26th May 2012
Apologies for the lateness of this post. We did the puzzle last weekend, but in the general chaos of moving house, I completely forgot that I was also meant to be writing it up, and we don’t have internet in the new place yet. We needed a couple of sessions to finish this one, which suggests that it’s on the hard side for Araucaria. I found it a satisfying solve, though – my favourite clue was 28 across, but there were lots of others that I noted for their cunning constructions.
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Posted in Guardian | 14 Comments »