Independent 7084 by Virgilius
An incredible puzzle – absolutely brilliant. In line with 14 across EVERY across solution had the name of a tree within the word as an internal part. The clues are, as always from … Read more >>
Month: June 2009
Financial Times 13,116 / Courtier
I don’t recognise the setter’s pseudonym so it is either a new contributor or a rebranding of an existing one for the purpose of this tennis related puzzle. Nothing particularly difficult today though … Read more >>
Guardian 24,739 – Araucaria
dd = double definition cd = cryptic definition rev = reversed or reversal ins = insertion cha = charade ha = hidden answer *(fodder) = anagram What a delightful offering from The Master … Read more >>
Independent 7083 by Hypnos
*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, CD=cryptic def, DD=double def I got most of this done fairly quickly, but then got stuck on 1,2,10,17 and 21. Most of these involved obscure or unusual words. There … Read more >>
Guardian 24,738 / Rover
A surprise not to have Rufus this morning but I remember that, a while ago, Andrew came up with the lovely description of Rover as ‘Rufus-lite’. Some very easy anagrams and several cryptic … Read more >>
Azed 1934 – Right and Left
The luck of the draw is giving me all the Azed specials to blog these days. Right and Left is another one that comes up fairly regularly: I think the format was devised … Read more >>
Everyman No. 3273 (June 21st).
Our first blog (as the The Trafites), and we look forward to doing this. A fairly straight forward Everyman this week. 25ac is unusual as we have seen RED RUM used for the … Read more >>
Beelzebub 1,009 (21/06/09)
*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition. Top stuff as always. I think I’ve managed to explain everything, but there’s a couple I’m a bit shaky on. Across 1 STICK INSECT – … Read more >>
Guardian 24,731 (Sat 20 Jun)/Paul – Sweet sixteen
Solving time: 13:44 This seemed about average difficulty for Paul, though I think I made heavy weather of it. As always there are some extremely inventive clues, and the lack of hyperlinks in … Read more >>
Independent 7081/Phi
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 … Read more >>
Financial Times 13,113 / Falcon
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 … Read more >>
Independent 7,076 by Nestor (Saturday Prize Puzzle, 20/06/09)
*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition. Nestor’s puzzles are always good, and I doubt that this was an exception, but for some reason I couldn’t really get any momentum going here. … Read more >>
Guardian 24736 / Pasquale
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 … Read more >>
EV867 — The Three Rs by Obtrox
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 … Read more >>
Inquisitor 129 TWENTY20 CRICKET by Loda
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 … Read more >>