Enigmatic Variations No. 1555: The Rules Of The Game by Ifor

The RULES OF THE GAME for the EV series seem to have changed, with it disappearing from the online Telegraph puzzle site and becoming a ‘paper-only’ puzzle…I hope most of you were still able to get your fix…

The preamble states that:

“All across answers must lose two or more letters to form the real-word entry according to one of three RULES OF THE GAME, applied in order within successive groups of three. The eight clues to three- and four-letter down entries each contain an extra word. Consecutive pairs each share a synonym (sometimes involving obsolete or dialect usage); the four synonyms, all of three or four letters, when taken in clue order form two thematic surnames. The name of the game must be written under the grid. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.”

So, all Across clues should be normal, with changes made between solution and entry. And eight Downs – out of eighteen, so less than half – have an extra word. Also, for Across clues, the difference between the enumeration and the grid slot will give the number of letters to be removed – 2 or 3, as it happens – and hopefully some Down crossers will help with deciding what stays and what goes…

With that in mind, I pressed on – starting with the Downs, to see if I could generate some of those crosssers. As I went along, some of the extra words started to become apparent – of which more later. Running through the Acrosses, I soon found JESSERANT – not a word I am familiar with, but the anagram fodder was fairly clear – J + SNEERS AT – and a bit of manipulation and dictionary checking confirmed it. It needed to lose two letters, and remain a real word, and at this stage I was assuming they should be consecutive letters, so it was likely to be JESS(ER)ANT, JESSE(RA)NT or JESSER(AN)T, and JESSANT turned out to be a real word, so ER was the likely removal.

Similarly, SERENE had to fit into 4 spaces, and I had an S at the start and an E at the end, so it could be ER again, leaving SENE – or maybe EN or NE, leaving SERE.

There were also two similar words – RESINATA and RESINATE, each needing to lose three letters, so these looked like the subtraction might be SIN, leaving REATA and REATE respectively.

And so things went on, with more potential ERs and SINs, but also some random-looking omissions – AL, COO, TE, SS.

In the meantime, the extra words had mostly revealed themselves, eventually yielding STANDARD, SCORE, INHABITANTS, DISCIPLES, TIP, SETTLE, ENCLOSES and DWELLING-PLACES. I confused myself a bit here by taking the preamble to mean ‘overlapping pairs’ sharing synonyms, so STANDARD and SCORE, SCORE and INHABITANTS, etc. this slowed me down somewhat! The first inkling I got was INHABITANTS = SONS = DISCIPLES, and that thought lingered a while.

To cut a long story short – and it was quite long, with the end coming only by the Thursday evening following publication, and a lot of picking up and putting down in between – I eventually realised that ‘consecutive pairs’ meant four separate pairs, and STANDARD and SCORE could be PAR, making PAR+SONS, possibly of the ‘Knicker-less’ variety.

I have to admit to never having listened to a single episode – maybe the odd snippet here and there – but I am aware of the radio show ‘Just A Minute‘, hosted since time immemorial by Nicholas PARSONS, and it didn’t take much research to find out THE RULES OF THE GAME:

1. No hesitation – so take ‘ER’ out of the first, fourth, etc. solutions – e.g. SERENE becomes SENE
2. No repetition – so take repeating letters out after the first instance, from the second, fifth, etc. – e.g. COCOON becomes CON
3. No deviation – so take the setters of SIN out, in that order, from the third, sixth, etc. – e.g. SIDEBURN becomes DEBUR

And the fact that the current host is Sue PERK+INS, helping to resolve the remaining synonyms. All that remained was to write the name of the game below the grid and submit:

It has been a while since I had the pleasure of blogging an Ifor EV – November 2020 to be precise – and this was certainly worth the wait! Many thanks for the challenge – and the education. I’m sure there will be many, more familiar with the theme than me, for whom the penny dropped much earlier, either through Parsons, or a ‘game’ with three rules…

Lastly, on the new EV (un)availability (and any opinions below are mine, and not any ‘official’ line from the FifteenSquared site):

• there had been talk a while back of it becoming ‘paper-only’, with the Telegraph puzzle site focussing only on puzzles that can be solved and submitted online, which seems to be the case with the new Telegraph puzzles site launched in the last couple of weeks – although the old site seems to still be available…for now
• by their very unpredictable and diverse nature, it would be extremely difficult/impossible to code every EV for online submission, so in the past there has been a link to a PDF copy of the puzzle on the old site, for anyone who had a subscription (around £36 a year?). This could be downloaded, printed, solved (or attempted!) and then submitted, if completed
• the PDF copy now seems to have been removed so, as far as I can tell, the only way to get hold of the puzzle from now on will be to buy a dead-tree copy (£2.50 a go, £130 a year), or buy an online subscription via something like PressReader, which usually costs around £100 a year, and gives electronic/facsimile versions of the paper as-printed, so it is possible to print the puzzle off from there, to solve on a paper copy. (Which is what I will be doing, as I already subscribed via PressReader, as well as to the puzzle site – a glutton for punishment!)
• the submission process has remained the same – you can either post your entry in, or you can scan/take a photo of it and e-mail it in
• as I said earlier, I hope everyone was able to get hold of a copy, but I am concerned that with the cost effectively tripling for anyone who just subscribed to the puzzle site, this may deter some solvers from getting hold of the puzzle – at a time when the EV has been struggling to survive, in terms of numbers of entries/online comments, etc.
• in addition, if anyone was subscribing to the old site just for the EV, your subscription is now effectively worthless…although there are lots of other Telegraph puzzles available on there, and the subscription seems to have been transferred across to the new site
• let’s hope the powers that be have a re-think, and somehow make the EV available in PDF format on the puzzle site again…
• (another consequence, for your bloggers, has been that it was quite easy to copy and paste the clues into the blog from the PDF version, whereas for this blog I have had to ‘scrape’ the clues from the printed version with some free OCR software I found online – so apologies if there are any errors in transcription of the clues…it was either that or type them all out by hand…)