Inquisitor 1799: Eyes Down by The Ace of Hearts

11 comments on “Inquisitor 1799: Eyes Down by The Ace of Hearts”

1. This was one of the tougher puzzles this year (so far). I got stuck when the grid was only half-filled, with none of the thematic clues solved, but it all started to make sense when I made …RSINBI?G? (from the message) into NUMBERS IN BINGO and solved DISTENT and PSION in quick succession to make STEPS. FERNYTICKLE and THEME followed, and the rest is history. I finished by replacing the bingo calls with their numbers.

   The theme was executed very well. One thing I noticed as the clashes got resolved was that they were all to the same pattern: Across then Down, e.g. QUEEN then BEE – a nice touch. The top right corner was the last to yield, with QUEEN BEE and IN A STATE my last two Bingo calls to discover.

   I know very few Bingo calls (STEPS being the only one here that I recognised), but that hardly mattered as they were easily found by looking them up.

   Thanks to The Ace and to kenmac.

2. Interesting – I took “in clue order these letters hint at how six cells must be filled in the final grid to resolve the problem that some clue answers are too long for the space available” to mean that we had to replace the clashes in the cells with the corresponding numbers for the bingo calls. Was it just me? A fine puzzle nevertheless…

3. No, Jon-S (@2). It was me as well (as I reported above)!

4. I always find this sub-genre of puzzle – ‘the overcrowded cell’? – both challenging and hard to abandon. Same this time, although I quickly learned, from the removed letters, that we were in bingo territory, leading to rather too much time studying the list on the internet – and I never did get Steps, despite having the first half. A very enjoyable solve, thanks to Ace of Hearts and kenmac.

5. The puzzle took us quite a while to complete – kept coming back to it over a few days. Once we sorted out the link with BINGO – it still took us ages to see STEPS as we expected the clashes to be at the beginning or the end of words.

   An enjoyable challenge though. We also entered the numbers.

   Thanks to kenmac and Ace of Hearts.

6. You know what – it never occurred to me to put the numbers in.

   What a Silly Billy.

7. After a toughie last week, here is another! I made very slow progress but spotted IN A STATE within the first few solves, which, coupled with the title, led me straight to the theme. Since I am not Bingo fan, I wrongly assumed this first number was 8 but Wiki soon put me right when I downloaded the complete list of “nicknames”. There were quite a few uncommon words, which coupled with some less than obvious (although sound) wordplay meant a long drawn out completion. I was glad I was was able to anticipate the gaps in the message to let me home in on the missing letters.
   19D gave me some grief: I guessed it had to be EARWIGS but had not met this to mean minions. WIGS was obvious but I could not justify EAR. Eventually, parsing it differently from Ken, I read “out of the ark till” as a clue within a clue (thE ARk), which I thought was very neat!
   My only quibble is the definition in 11D. Surely to be synonymous with “reached”, “came” needs a suitable preposition to follow it (came upon, came to, etc)
   A long haul but worth the struggle. Thanks to The Ace and Ken.

8. I took one look at the title and immediately thought of bingo, then settled down to a relatively tough solve. I too replaced the nicknames with numbers, also noting the ‘across then down’ pattern of the clashes, which I thought was neat. How lovely if would have been if the numbers had been ordered as they would sit on a bingo card – that would have really been a grid construction to admire. Overall a fun and engaging puzzle with some really fine clues.

9. Not a big fan of this one. A bit disappointed that the Bingo Nos seem to have no connection with where they are in the grid, then having located GARDEN PARTY, RED RAW, STEPS and TICKLE ME, I thought that at least the six cells might be placed symmetrically – they aren’t. BATES at 16a for “psycho” took me a while to twig, and I stumbled over BEE-EATERS at 6d – the clue indicates 2 words, Chambers gives it as hyphenated.

   Thanks to The AoH and to Silly Billy for the blog.

   PS for Dave W @7: Chambers gives “reach” under the headword “come”. Maybe as in “I came home at 6 o’clock” or “I reached home at 6 o’clock”?

10. Thanks, HG@9, on the ball as usual – good example which I had not thought of. Apologies to Ace for the slander.

11. Coming in late to add thanks to Ace of Hearts and kenmac. It was a tough struggle and I was grateful for the big nudge given by the title. Putting the numbers in seemed the right thing to do, and it was a relief that I ended up with the same assignments as kenmac — none of the calls in the grid was familiar.

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