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According to the Crossword Database (which is operational again after some heavy bot traffic recently), there have been seven puzzles where a certain board game has featured, two of them Listeners. (Spoiler alert, this is the eighth/third.)
Paddock’s previous Listener was over four years ago with its arachnid theme (no. 4649, Get Weaving). This week’s gave the impression of being fairly forgiving, there being only six clues needing modification by having an extra letter removed.
1ac Nick lies about giving up university course (6) had me think that PPE would feature somehow. It was well into the puzzle that RESORT got slotted in [TROUSER< – U]. Luckily, 5ac Tombs locals placed outside Mesopotamian city (6) was more straightforward with INURNS [INNS around UR].
12 and 13 with their extra letters held me up on progressing the acrosses. 12 was one of my favourites Black bird wanting it to rain (4) with Black for Back [ PEEWIT< – IT] and 13 Conifer wood decorated originally dull dresser (4) with Conifer for Confer [DO + W(ood) D(ecorated)]. All in all, progress proved relatively slow, with GLASS CRAB, EPAENETIC and NEOPILINA being particularly troublesome.
There were some nice clues along the way, however. 33ac What’s in the hearts of those enamoured and betrothed? (4) gave us LOVE [(th)O(se) (enamO(ured) (betr)O(thed)], a sort of &lit I guess. 20dn Elderly side with first-class cricketer of old losing wicket (7) for AGGRACE [A + WG GRACE – W]. Then there was the horrifyingly topical 30dn Tesla’s hot underneath, with Musk venting wings accordingly (4) for THUS [T + H + (M)US(k)]!
I guess most of us got the way into the endgame by having SCRABBLE jump out from row 6, rather than unjumbling LIOKEX. For me, I needed to use Google to discover its origin was a game by Alfred Butts who called it LEXIKO. It then needed us to count up the number of occurrences of each letter in the central 10×10 area to correspond with the number of each letter in the game. (That took me three attempts!) It appeared that there were several options here, but wiki provided the correct count. We had to finish off our grid by placing the two blank tiles in rows 5 and 8 to give POINT [BLANK] and [BLANK]ETING as hinted at by the title Plain Cloth.
A very enjoyable puzzle. Thanks, Paddock.
Full clue analysis can be found at the Listener Crossword website.
Not sure whether this is of interest to anyone, but I did a little video-recap of 3 out of 4 March Listeners and decided that I will carry on making them on a weekly basis until the end of the year or until I get bored, whichever comes first.