Inquisitor 1613: Class Action by Stuball

9 comments on “Inquisitor 1613: Class Action by Stuball”

1. A good, enjoyable debut! I found the grid fill to be quite difficult indeed, and before the end game had 28d wrong (IRON, anybody?) Resolving the names of our feathered friends and realising I was out with the substitutions, though, meant that I spotted it. Which is what I like about this kind of end game, my error rate being what it is. 🙂

2. This is my first experience of this setter, and at the outset (having read the preamble) I was keen to see how I coped with the way every answer, both Across and Down, had to be treated before entry into the grid.

   Solving the clues is always half the fun, and I enjoyed this phase very much. I must have been single-minded about it (or blinkered, perhaps) because it was only when I had the last corner to complete (the top left, with six clues left to solve) that I noticed that some across lights approximated to birds’ names. These were evidently thematic, and with this new information I succeeded in replacing most of the 24 letters and resolving most of the ambiguities. The theme helped me to complete the puzzle, the last and trickiest clue being 3d TI TREE.

   I must have found this more challenging than you did, Duncan, because I thought it was one of the best and most satisfying of this year’s Inquisitors. Some of the clues were especially good. There were a lot of words I had to look up, for both the crossword clues and the birds, but the rewards more than made up for that. The way that just two changes to every across entry resulted in a grid almost full of birds’ names was amazing. And it was a complete puzzle without any “setter’s whim” of the sort that sometimes gets tacked on to the endgame.

   I’d like to add that Bradford’s Lists helped me with the endgame.  All the birds are there, with the sole exception of TARSEL (but it has both TASSEL and TARCEL).  All are in Chambers.

   Congratulations to Stuball and many thanks to Duncan for the blog.

3. One small point: it was an odd grid, with some three letter words having one unch, and a couple of four letter words having none! I got confused in the endgame and ended up with SITTA, but I didn’t help myself by failing to solve 9 ac and guessing ROBIN from the theme.

   Thanks for a very comprehensive blog, Duncan, and congratulations to Stuball on an impressive debut.

4. I have to confess I never did see the bird thing, though I did imagine I’d finished, pretty much (among my final words were ratch, emo, curl and rusting). It seemed to work, but I knew I was missing something…

   Clearly very clever, and fun even for one missing the point. Thanks to Stuball and Duncan.

5. I think that this is one of those puzzles where it was more satisfying for the setter than for the solver. Entry of answers was challenging and then soon became tedious. Working out what to replace in the across answers, once again, led to much head scratching.

   In the end, it fell a bit flat, just looking for (sometimes obscure) birds – and what did the title have to do with anything?

6. I’m very much with Alan B #2 on this one – I thought it was an astonishing piece of construction: every across clue being a bird which could be formed by changing one letter from a word that itself could be formed by dropping a single letter from another word and then on top of that the down entries also being adaptable in this same way with the removed letters matching the required changes to the across entries!!! I found the solving process quite a slog, but wow, was it worth it. Totally disagree with kenmac #5 – the finished grid was more than satisfying from my perspective and indeed I picked it up again several times during the week just to admire it.

   I’d noticed quite a few birds as possibilities for the adaptions quite early on, but I also had some other speculative changes giving me other animals or objects and going by the title I was guessing at 3 or 4 classes of things that moved in different ways – fly, walk, roll, …. My admiration rose even more when I realised that all the entries were turning into birds.

7. I certainly agree with OPatrick‘s opening remark @6. Yes my final 4 clues took 2 days, and yes it was worth it, but it wasn’t a ‘wow’ for me, more amazement and admiration at Stuball‘s feat. Anyway, thanks to him/her (is it Stu-ball or Stub-all I wonder) for the puzzle and to Duncan for the blog.
   BTW, my guess is that the intended wordplay for the OD in 9a is O=old & D=Dominus (Latin)=Lord.

8. An impressive puzzle – especially for a debut.

   We would agree with kenmac and others about the search at the end for the rather more obscure birds but we have spent far longer sorting out the endgame of other IQs.

   Well done Stuball and welcome to the IQ. Thanks Duncan for another very comprehensive blog.

9. I’m catching up on a backlog of IQs.  This was a great puzzle, and a very impressive grid fill indeed. More like 3 grid fills really: the original answers, the shortened answers and the modified answers.  Real words all the way though and every across answer a bird.  Very impressive and a great PDM when I twigged what was going on.

   I didn’t find the obscurity of some of the birds an issue: obscure words are par for the course in IQ puzzles, one the reasons I come here in the first place.

   Thanks to all.

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