Guardian Genius 236 – Pangakupu

10 comments on “Guardian Genius 236 – Pangakupu”

1. Thanks Pangakupu and Andrew.
   Adding to my dnf count.
   Had all the unmodified ones, but missed 5 of the 16.
   Which ones didn’t matter, but saw all of them had (xOR), just dropping those 3 letters worked ok at most places…where I didn’t have the solutions, I was stuck. Obviously I couldn’t see DECISION.
   Even if I had seen it as xORy, it would not have helped without solutions to 5 clues.
   Yes, it is of Genius standard.

2. Thanks to Pangakupu, and for the blog Andrew – I agree with your assessment of the ‘genius level’. I took us a little while for the xORy to drop completely, but as you say, it’s still not straightforward even when it does – the last few took some time to grind out.
   We were slightly thrown by expecting the crossing letters to spell DECISIONS, DECISIONS, the printed instructions seemed to indicate one-word of 16 letters, but to be fair the online entry form did show 8 for the letter-count.

3. Nice puzzle; the gimmick became clear just at the right time to provide difficulty at the start and help at the end.
   I found the preamble woolly and confusing, so that I wondered if the editor had again interfered with the setter’s instructions:
   ‘Clashes affecting 16 solutions must be modified in a consistent way to fit them in the grid. … In clue order, the letters in the squares containing the modifications spell out a thematic word.’
   While this points in the right direction, it doesn’t describe what’s happening or what’s required. The term ‘clashes’ as commonly used means that where two answers cross they have different letters. That’s not the case here. It is not clashes that should be modified, it is solutions (in any event, clashes need resolving, not modifying). The solutions have to be modified (a) so that they fit and (b) so that there are no clashes. The modification is to omit ‘X OR’ or ‘OR Y’, so the squares containing the letters of DECISION do not contain the modifications.
   Compare the instructions for today’s Azed which are crystal clear.

4. At the beginning of the month I spent a pleasant couple of hours on this puzzle, eventually finding where all the ‘clashes’ occurred but leaving three clues still to solve in the top left. That was the point at which I decided to stop, purely because I couldn’t understand how to follow the instruction in the first sentence of the preamble.

   Fortunately, when I picked up the puzzle again near the end of the month, I clearly saw what I had to do with the contents of the clashing cells. Going back to my three unsolved clues, I solved them, possibly with some help from the _OR_ ‘template’ in their clashing cells, and then saw that there was always a matching letter to pick from the options. ‘D E C I S I O N’ duly came out in clue order of all the Across solutions (what might be termed ‘in grid order’, as the blogger pointed out).

   I take James’s point about the instructions. I would have said ‘resolved’ rather than modified and made one or two other changes to follow that. (There does seem to be a general problem with the use of words in the preambles of Genius puzzles, ‘wordplay’ being another that I have seen used in a confusing way more than once, albeit not in this puzzle.)

   Thanks to Pangakupu for a meaty and enjoyable puzzle and to Andrew for his clear blog.

5. Thanks Andrew.
   I found this hard to get going, but when I did spot the xORy trick it became an aid to solving as it gave two extra letters for the solutions – further helped by the letters from the “thematic word”.
   Many thanks to Pangakupu.

6. I got the xORy idea almost immediately, which helped a lot with knowing that the clashing clues had to have _OR_ at the clashing point. It was a kindness to include in the instructions that some answers could be multi-word or hyphenated–I might not have ever realized that on my own. I struggled the longest time with HUMOROUS and DOOR HANDLES, expecting “humourous,” which, of course, does not fit. Also, I could not see the “on ice” part of TONIC, even though that was obviously the correct answer. Well done on the blog, and thanks to Pangakupu.

7. James @3 – I agree the instructions were imprecise (at least), as is often the case with Geniuses, but I wonder if that is deliberate, and de-obfuscating the instructions is meant to be part of the challenge?

8. Took me a while to figure out what was going on, but when the pd, it came together nicely. Good to know that Pangakupu is Phi as along with JH he is one of my setters. Thought Door handles was an excellent clue – it had me foxed for ages and was my LOI.

9. From memory, the only thing that gave me difficulty wass whether INTERI (ORS) should have been Inferi (ors). Like you Andrew, I came down on the side that you did as the most natural reading of the clue. I like the substitution type of clue, but I’m not a fan when they are ambiguous.

10. Not much to add to the comments above – I was slow to see the “or” trick, having perhaps 5 or 6 of the solutions which needed modification before the light dawned. And I was very confused by the thematic word instructions and even had a table of which clue crossed with which other and which letter was selected, but it turned out to be much simpler than it said!

    So mainly here just to add my thanks to the setter for a puzzle of excellent difficulty and well-crafted clues which I really enjoyed solving, and to Andrew for the very clear blog.

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