Well, this was a real Genius puzzle.
We knew we were in for a serious challenge this month when we read (or tried to read) the preamble:
Tjyuffo tpmvujpot nvtu cf fodjqifsfe cfgpsf fousz jo uif hsje. Pof pg uiftf fousjft jt jojujbmmz bo bccsfwjbujpo.
This is obviously in code and fortunately we realised almost immediately that it is a fairly straightforward code, apparently known as The Caesar Shift, where each letter is moved forward or back in the alphabet – in the case of the preamble by one letter forward. The Preamble therefore reads:
Sixteen solutions must be enciphered before entry in the grid. One of these entries is initially an abbreviation.
As there are 34 clues to the puzzle, nearly half of them have to be encoded, tending to nullify the assistance we normally expect from crossing letters. So, in effect every clue has to be solved from scratch – making things very tricky.
However, as we gradually filled the grid, it became clear that some crossers clashed and others matched, eventually enabling us to figure out which were the 16 encoded entries. We realised that several of these had mutually checked letters and also that each entry used a different ‘Caesar Shift’. We ended up having to reprint the grid and entered those entries which we believed did not change. This was the breakthrough! Using the crossing letters from the uncoded entries, it became clear that all the encoded entries were real words as well! And they are symmetrically located in the grid.
Hats off to Soup for an amazing grid-fill.
Coded entries are highlighted in the completed grid below. Original solutions to these clues are in green in the following text.
LANK (thin) inside or ‘encompassed by’ an anagram of AIR’S – anagrind is ‘not exactly’
An anagram of I (one) O (ring) and GEMS – anagrind is ‘reset’
GOReY (the Gashlycrumb Tinie’s author) missing e or with ‘eccentricity’ overlooked. GORY is then encoded moving each letter 6 back
R (final letter of cultivar) inside or ‘introduced to’ FENS (part of East Anglia). FERNS is then encoded moving each letter back 4.
TURDus (the Thrush genus) removing or ‘scraping off’ ‘us’ (you and I). TURD is then encoded, moving each letter back 2 to give the abbreviation referred to in the preamble
NEE (born) DSS (benefits agency or Department of Social Security as it was once known) around or ‘adopting’ L E (last or ‘ultimate’ letters of ineffectual role)
A clue-as-definition – hidden within BedouIN DO ORigami with the ‘not outside’ also acting as the inclusion indicator
PA PA (personal assistants – ‘aides’). PAPA is then coded by moving each letter back 12 places
sADDER (more upset) missing first letter or ‘stamping on its head’. Each letter in ADDER is then moved forward 1 place.
S (small) PIT (hole). SPIT is then encoded by moving each letter back 15 places
TEA SERvice (cups and saucers etc) removing ‘vice’ (blemish)
An anagram of ERASURE’S – anagrind is ‘performance’
Hidden in or ‘a piece of’ piECRUst. ECRU is then encoded by moving each letter back 2 places
HOLY (blessed) with L (first or ‘chief’ letter of leader) appearing again. HOLLY is then encoded by moving each letter back 6
A reversal of KERmiT (frog) without or ‘squashing’ mi (note). TREK is then encoded by moving each letter forward 9 places
After an accident in Chicago involving JO (sweetheart) the message could be that JO is IN ER (Emergency Room – equivalent of A&E in the USA). Snug refers to the character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who was a carpenter.
An anagram of CUE CARDS – anagrind is ‘wretched’
A homophone (‘told’) of CREWS (sailors)
PAT (Postman as in the very popular children’s programme Postman Pat) H (first letter or ‘beginning’ to he) gives you PATH. This is then encoded by moving each letter forward 11 places
Hidden in or ‘entering’ havEN A BLEssing
A play on the fact that if something stands the test of time it may well WEAR well. The River WEAR is in County Durham. you then encode WEAR by moving each letter back 4.
AERO (chocolate bar) and BS (rubbish as in bullshit) around or ‘taking’ IC (running or in charge). We ended up having to look online for some help with this at the end of the solve. We could not parse BICS – well done to those who did.
The clue suggests that it is UU (about turns) inside RD (road) but you then do the opposite (‘quite the reverse’) to give you URDU. This is then encoded by moving letters back 3
After dinner one might (if one were suitably posh) SUP PORT
DR (doctor – ‘medic’) OPS (operations, which could be a doctor’s work)
OFF (away) in TrossachS without the middle letters or ‘on vacation’ – giving you TOFFS. This is encoded by moving each letter one back
DUD (useless) E S (east and south – opponents in card games such as bridge). We had not heard of DUDES being city men on holiday, but there it is in Chambers
An anagram of ORANGE (anagrind is ‘chopped’) + O (egg) – Bert is never too happy with egg=O as no letter ‘o’s are actually egg-shaped, but it is a common device in cryptics – just a bit of a bugbear with him.
The first letters or ‘leaders’ of Bevin Ebbw Re-elects Its, repeated or ‘with a rerun’. We were completely baffled by this one until we checked ‘Aneurin’ in Chambers
SS (special force) in or ‘covered by’ AUCH (German for ‘also’)
An anagram of GARdeNER without ‘de’ (first two letters of delphiniums) – anagrind is ‘upset’
A clue-as-definition: YETI is hidden or ‘might be glimpsed’ in BumgYE TIbet. This is encoded by moving each letter back 6 to give SYNC – interestingly the uncoded solution at 29d
First letters or ‘starts’ of So Your New Computer give SYNC. This is encoded by moving each letter back (or forward!) by 13 to give FLAP
WI (Women’s Institute – ‘group of ladies’) + LadY without the middle letters or ‘heartless’. This is encoded by moving each letter 6 forward
My first ‘Genius’ puzzle and can only say, “wow”.
Had always been put off by the thought it would be incredo-hard, but this was very much “tough but fair”.
The special condition seemed impossible to crack until noticing that DROPS and OREGANO shared a crosser with PAPA. That lead to DODO and the realisation that all the enciphered solutions were actual words too!
Armed with this knowledge the special condition then became an actual help, and, e.g. I was able to use it to back-solve HOLLY from BxFFS. Loved the way YETI became SYNC and SYNC became FLAPS. and also how the Tory TOFFS became SNEER and the thrush dropping mutated to the RSPB. I think in fairness, the setter took mercy and provided some easier-to-solve clues which definitely helped too.
I semi-biffed JOINER as my LOI having figured out the complex charade (hadn’t seen JO for Sweetheart before, but apparently it is a thing), and didn’t get the Shakespeare allusion til later. This was a fine clue to finish off on!
Big thanks to Soup, for great entertainment and bertandjoyce for explaining it so well.
There is a helpful Nina – CAESAR CIPHER – hidden in the top and bottom rows of the grid.
Thanks bridgesong – how did we miss that? In our defence, we were probably so impressed with the grid construction that we didn’t think about looking further.
We quickly decoded the instructions, but made the mistake of assuming the ciphered solutions would also move by just one letter, until that became untenable. Crossing out some nonsense words, the penny eventually dropped that all the ciphered solutions were real words.
As Epeesharkey says, most of the clues were reasonably easy – thank goodness!
Certainly a triumph of construction from Soup – and the NINA (which we also missed) was the icing on the Christmas cake!
A really enjoyable and impressive puzzle. I wonder how long it took Soup to find the 16 special entries? My initial thought after deciphering the preamble was that words would be encoded by shifting letters back by one place but that obviously didn’t lead anywhere. It was helpful that the 16 were all symmetrically placed – and including a NINA as well (which I only saw after filling the grid).
Thanks for the blog Bertandjoyce – I also couldn’t parse BICS so good to see how that worked.
I thought this was an amazing feat of grid construction – thanks to setter and bloggers!
Once I realised, like others above, that the offset wasn’t just going to be the one letter of the instruction, I resorted to Excel** – splitting the solutions into individual cells and using some simple text manipulation formulae to add/subtract letters. I could then rove up and down through offsets from 1 to 25 and pick out any nuggets that became visible!
Still some work to do, putting them in the grid and checking crossers, and ‘re-scanning’ the offsets every time I got another clue, but quicker, easier and more reliable than doing it mentally or manually.
And it meant I had all the answers typed out to be copied/pasted into the submission grid, reducing the risk of human error there, which has happened before…
I completely missed the Nina – I think I was so exhausted by the end that I went for a lie down in a darkened room…
(**other spreadsheet programs are available!)
Thanks BertandJoyce. Like mc_rapper67 I used a spreadsheet to help list the cypher options. I was actually able to dig out the one I created for a previous Genius. I looked it up in the archive and it was number 137 by Qaos back in 2014.
I really enjoyed this one, although I couldn’t parse BICS (and I also missed both the symmetry and the Nina in the grid).
Many thanks to Soup.
Wow – very enjoyable. My congraulations to Soup. A few definitions that I also did not know: the meaning of DUDES, for example. And aneurin is thiamine!
I had BREDS instead of FERNS for a long while, and that got me very stuck in the NW corner (I was pretty sure WEAR was the river but it didn’t fit). Apparently a bred is a (rare) word for a cultivar or type of plant, and Beds is in East Anglia, sort of.
I did get 31a wrong, so no chance of £100 for me. I was stuck on “snug” as a corner in a pub, and didn’t know “Jo” as sweetheart, or the Shakespeare reference, so I was stuck on CORNER as my answer for ages (I thought CO might be some kind of contraction for Chicago). I got the “in ER” bit and thought that COINER might be some kind of rare synonym for corner or snug (perhaps from the French ‘coin’) but I couldn’t find that definition anywhere online – because it doesn’t exist! – so CORNER was what went in for me. Ah well.
Very impressed at Soup’s discovery of all those enciphered words – to replace with real words *and* have a Nina (which I didn’t spot at all) is quite the achievement.
Very good. I probably didnt finish it. I know I didnt have a partner solving it.
I remember writing out the alphabet
Thanks to both Soup and Chambers are in order-and for the excellent blog
Thanks very much for the blog, bertandjoyce, and for the nice comments, others. DuncT@7 – I’m very sad to see this has been done before! It was before my (setting) time, so I had no idea (and Hugh didn’t pick me up on it); sorry for seemingly nicking Qaos’ idea (although curiously I used none of the words which he used).
Re the preamble: I very, very strongly believe that there should be a moment when you open the Genius PDF that you think ‘what the …?!’ and it looks utterly impenetrable, or you get a ‘seriously?!’ moment (like with the missing vowels puzzle). I think that solvers get a lot of satisfaction from being able to ‘beat’ the Genius puzzle, so it needs to feel like there is some effort to be made to even start it. But that’s just what I think; others may have different opinions.
It was fun to set. I wrote a computer program to find all potential changed words; there were only a few hundred, and mostly four and five (longest were SULPHUR/PRIMERO, RATPITS/CLEATED and ABJURER/NOWHERE) so I knew I couldn’t get a full grid of them, which is what I wanted. So I found a grid which had lots of fours and fives (sorry, too many short words, I know) and then got CCW to try out a few grid fills for me. Then I realised I could add a Nina to give people more help with the ciphers (fat lot of good that was as virtually nobody spotted it!); then I realised that I could get the ciphered words to be symmetrical in the grid as well. After that it was just normal setting. The end result looks more impressive than I think it deserves to!
I wish I had used a different clue for WEAR – I don’t like that one now. My favourites are AEROBICS (sorry about the parsing) and BERIBERI – once I’d found that vitamin B was Aneurin there was no way I couldn’t use Bevan as the first word after it. Bert: there are some interesting studies on egg shape (beautifully illustrated at https://vis.sciencemag.org/eggs/) – and also remember that it’s not just birds that lay eggs. Turtle eggs are perfectly spherical, as are platypus eggs (13mm diameter)!
Now working on the next one, whenever I’m allowed back.
(I’m also not happy with 29 – there’s no possessive for ‘starts’ to work with. Slap on wrist.)
I managed to solve this with quite a lot of work. I didn’t spot the Nina, nor the symmetry of the encoded clues. Reading this blog (thx B&J) makes me appreciate the puzzle even more. Very well done, Soup!
I seem to be unusual in having spotted the Nina, and it helped me with a couple of the down clues at the bottom of the grid. I should have added my congratulations to Hamish on the elegance of the final grid.
Just wanted to drop in and add my appreciation for this puzzle (and the blog). Remarkable grid fill. I’m another spreadsheet solver (Google Sheets in this case, to redress the balance) and created a sheet which gave me all shifts of a given word – that allowed me to see at a glance what the likely encoding was and also to reject quickly words which did not encode.
I missed the nina- thanks for that – and also was puzzled for a while by the fact that solutions could not overlap when shifted as per the preamble. It took surprisingly long to realise the shift was variable.
Kudos to the setter not only for the very clever grid fill but also for providing a puzzle with just the right degree of “WTF?” to start with, easy enough entries to get started and understand the puzzle and really hard finishers. A very worthy Genius and a very enjoyable puzzle to solve all round, so thank you Soup, and thanks Bertandjoyce for blogging it so clearly.
Soup@10 – I can’t see any need for apologies, this is a great device for the Genius slot and if anything I’m surprised it hasn’t appeared more often. It’s also a bit surprising that the vitamin B/Aneurin link isn’t more widely used – you must have been delighted when you found it.
… and I think 29d is a great clue. The surface makes perfect sense, as far as I can see.
Forgot to say in my previous comment: I was unhappy with “You and I” being used for ‘us’ in 12ac. I can’t think of a case where “you and I” is a strict synonym for ‘us’ – surely it should have been “you and me” in the clue (accusative or dative rather than nominative).
Oh, Francis, that’s a fascinating comment… I will rack my brains but on first thought that comment is accurate. I will report back after talking to my pet pedants!
Thanks B&J and Soup.
I really enjoyed this and congratulate Soup on very cleverly finding real words for the changed answers. Probably one of my top three favourite Geniuses [the puzzle – not Soup!], since I started doing these about 8-10 years ago.
I stupidly got fixated on trying to make ‘Marathon’ [remember those, before they were ridiculously renamed as ‘Snickers’ bars?] part of 5D. I often do end up down the wrong alleys.
Was the introduction that said “….one of these entries is initially an abbreviation” correct? If the entry refers to RSPB then the word ‘initially’ is redundant as an abbreviation is obviously an….abbreviation; or did Hamish mean “…..is finally an abbreviation”. I am just curious.
For anyone who really likes puzzles where letters or words need to be swapped, using a special algorithm method, and still make real words, and with a final twist with the grid at the end then I can handily recommend Genius 171 by QAOS. That was also one of my three favourite Geniuses I have done.
Gordon @19 – thank you, high praise! I had hoped the Qaos one you were talking about was this one – it’s an absolute peach.
I had originally said ‘is an acronym’ but was told an acronym has to be pronounceable (radar, laser…); an abbreviation is something like Dr or Mrs, whereas an initial abbreviation is RSPB. I was a bit befuddled by that point so I just nodded and agreed 🙂
@Hamish/Soup 18. thank you – it only really matters because I spent ages trying to find a word to remove ‘we’ from.
@Gordon 19. you weren’t the only one who was fixated on Marathon bars! 🙂
Hi Francis @21
I think Hamish is too young and too posh to recall Marathon bars!!
Is it too far in the past for me to remember much about this puzzle. I’ve probably done about 50 puzzles since then. But I did complete it, and knew the name of the code, but failed to spot the nina. I did remember the previous Genius along the same lines, as it was possibly one of the first I’d ever tackled.
Thanks Hamish, and I’m already looking forward to that pint.
Gordon@21 – neither. I was born in 1980, so was 10 when it changed. I didn’t like the name then and I still don’t! I remember reading a book when I was eight where some kid packed his suitcase ‘full of Snickers’ and I had no idea what it was on about.
Not sure why you think me too posh for it; I admit I went to a public school, but I try *very* hard not to fulfil the stereotypes…
Hi Hamish @24 – I am sure you realise that I was merely teasing you a bit; it is all part of the fun. I was born in 1951 in Stockport, before moving to USA in 2001 [temporarily I thought and still hope to return in a year or so]. I often recall an old phrase which I shall paraphrase: “You can take the boy out of Stockport, but you cannot take Stockport out of the boy.” Our backgrounds do shape and influence us, even if we try not to allow that to happen.
Like you I hate the ‘Americanisation’ of names – not just Marathon to Snickers, but Opal Fruits to Starburst and a couple of others I cannot recall. My American wife thinks I am just awkward as I still refuse to say Toemaytoe or Bayzil for the veggie fruit and the herb [or ‘erb as she says].
I am surprised though that you went to public school and still did not know what made an abbreviation an acronym. Tut tut. What did you learn? Rugger and Cricket, old boy, with some Latin and Greek?!
I am sure Gaufrid will get at me for being too much off topic, so I shall stop whingeing now!
Anyhow thanks again for the great crossword and I hope you can do another example sometime of your fist Genius with the doubling up of the across clues. Great fun.
Gordon@25: They will always be Opal Fruits 🙂
I didn’t really get a formal grammar education at school, I don’t think – at least, I don’t remember being taught that difference. I was pathetic at sport, though, and those pathetic at sport were taught sport by staff who didn’t want to teach sport, so I never got any better at it. (I do think with a good teacher I might have been a lot better than I was.) I was a tolerable fly half at rugby because I could run fast over short distances; hopeless at cricket, but I was the scorer for the 1st XI for five years. Latin for a year, Greek for a term – I’ve learned more Latin by singing in chapel choirs at Cambridge! Curiously, I didn’t do biology A level, and I’m now doing a PhD at the interface of botany and zoology. (I’ll be giving a talk about some of it on 15 Feb: https://www.cabk.org.uk/event/the-beecraft-research-lectures/ )
As for the ‘doubling of across clue’ puzzle: never, ever again. It was insanely hard to set, and (from most people’s comments) not that much fun to solve either.