Annoyingly, I forgot that we were meant to be blogging this crossword until a reminder from Gaufrid today, so we were too late to actually enter the solution. However, it was fun to rush through for the sake of the post! It’s a very cleverly constructed puzzle from Picaroon, with high quality clues throughout.

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Guardian. Genius. Araucaria. What more to say?!…

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The Genius lulls you into a false sense of security.  You know you have a month to complete it so you keep putting off starting it. Then when you do you start, you realise it  is quite hard  and you ask yourself ‘why didn’t I start it earlier’?

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After a worryingly poor showing in my first session on this one, things went much better in the second and I managed to work my way bit by bit though it, with the various extra hurdles adding both to the difficulty and to the enjoyment and satisfaction. Read the rest of this entry »

The preamble read as follows:

Ten solutions can also be 30, initially. Any secondary definition or wordplay in their clues leads to the solution as it might appear if it were, indeed, 30 of any 26 12 before 22 down 22 across. With one of these cases, where proverbially the solution cannot be 30, a palatable alternative (carrying the smallest possible 26 14) is required.

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Well, this was an interesting challenge. My initial progress was quite rapid because I concentrated on the clues that were obviously not affected by the special instructions.

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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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Wow – thank goodness we get a month to do these – I take my hat off to those mentioned in the Grauniad’s dispatches with entries submitted in the early hours of the morning after publication… Anyway, this is my first Genius blog – and something of a payback, as I have been lucky enough to pick up the £100 prize on a couple of occasions in the previous 111. The preamble tells us that the answer to a ‘megaclue’ -  “Get a credible Marx line of beauty – evokes a countenance, if girl a top model” (16 words) – needs to be entered ‘wherever it will go’ – which looks like mainly round the outside – and there are 10 corrected misprints to be arranged into a ‘condition for winning the prize’.

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This is my six-monthly venture into the world of Genius blogging.  Seeing Enigmatist’s name as the setter made me think that this puzzle would be a mite challenging.  So it proved to be.

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As the instructions say: “All clues are normal [phew!]. Half of the 28 solutions must be turned round and entered in the grid backwards.” This meant filling in answers in pencil until their direction could be confirmed by crossing letters. In addition “ambiguities about the orientation of on quarter of the solutions are resolved by ensuring that the final grid contains an appropriate thematic wish (made by one of the clued solutions).” The ambiguities (which in fact were all the 5 and 7 letter answers apart from the poet at 19dn) were answers such as 15ac, GENESES, where the checked letters are _E_E_E_ and so don’t determine which way the word is to be entered. With help from the unambiguous answers it became clear that the “wish” was in the squares around the perimeter, which spell out the vaguely-appropriate “Because I do not hope to turn again”, the opening line (previously unfamiliar to me) of the poem Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot (who appears, reversed, at 19dn).

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Unlike most recent puzzles in this series, there were no special instructions.  It was just a tough cryptic (and here’s a link to the pdf of the puzzle), but made more difficult by what appears to have been an unusual error (which was subsequently corrected by the Guardian crossword editor, after I had pointed it out).  Some of the clues which comprised a phrase had the word “words” following the enumeration.  There appeared to be no reason for this, nor was there any connection that I could see between the answers.  There was a mini-theme and the usual wide range of literary references. Read the rest of this entry »

 I shall be blogging this puzzle once the deadline for submissions has passed.  Solvers who are struggling with it may care to note the slight amendment to the enumeration of certain of  the clues which has now appeared on the Guardian website.

So, six clues have the correct wordplay for the grid entry but the definition is that of a word or phrase formed by combining the grid entry with one of the unclued entries. Should be straightforward enough.

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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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I have been unable to contact the scheduled blogger to find out why a blog for this puzzle hasn’t been posted so here is an analysis of the clues (I can’t remember the solving process, it was over a month ago!).

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