Inquisitor #9 – Search by Loda
Solving time: 3-4 hours An nice example of a fairly standard advanced cryptic puzzle type – “entries mangled according to a theme to be identified”. In this case, there are some thematic entries … Read more >>
petebiddlecombe
Independent 6356 / Punk – Wot no choo-choo?
Solving time 11:07 (if correct) A theme that kept me guessing for a while, as the crucial no. 5 didn’t fall until I’d got one of the theme answers, most of which are … Read more >>
Inquisitor #7 by Buff – ACADEMY AWARDS
Solving time 2-3 hours I joked with Loonapick a couple of weeks ago that even-numbered Indies were easy and odd-numbered ones hard. Not now, with last week’s Offa’s Dyke marathon and this (for … Read more >>
Azed 1811 – waves and wave-dwellers
Solving time 16:05, without Chambers This is probably about as easy as Azed gets. Easy for me anyway, as 1A was a word I knew, and 9 first letters of relatively easy down … Read more >>
Independent 6340 / Nimrod – a bit of a puzzle …
Solving time: about 38 minutes. Timing is a bit rough – I was traversing London by train and tube, and there were various interruptions for changes. There is some kind of theme here, … Read more >>
Inquisitor #5 / Psyche – ON STAGE
Solving time: at least 4 hours – maybe 6 A theme with an echo of Phi’s Inquisitor #3 – can’t remember doing a Psyche puzzle before, and have no idea who it is. … Read more >>
Independent 6328 / Nestor – arty and crafty
Solving time: 30 minutes More ingenious clues from Nestor here, making a puzzle I found very hard – I suspect others who struggled more than me on other Nestors will have beaten me … Read more >>
Guardian 23988 / Paul – difficult
Solving time 14:42 Not much to do here, so let’s have a go. This was pretty tough, and there are three clues I don’t understand or can’t quite swallow. For me, these slightly … Read more >>
Independent 6329 / Math – pretty tough
Solving time 10:00 + ?? Had most of this done in about 8 mins, but was stuck on 5 and 16 – I had an answer for 16 but as it seemed to … Read more >>
Inquisitor #3 – CAST ASIDE by Phi
(an anonymous puzzle in the paper, but the setter has already been identified elsewhere) Solving time: ages Found this one really tough – maybe the “blogger’s curse” (anything you have to write about … Read more >>
Independent 6316 / Nimrod – on the box again
Solving time 25:25 A while after his Countdown puzzle, Nimrod gives us another TV puzzle. 9D’s catchphrase, “I don’t believe it” appears in the unchecked letters on the left and right edges of … Read more >>
Guardian 23,967 / Pasquale – ceci n’est pas facile
Solving time 13:30 Quite tricky this one – partly because of 22,11,12 which I didn’t get until many checking letters were in place – “C _ C _ / N _ _ _ … Read more >>
Inquisitor #1 – Message from Loda
Just as we start a new year and begin to write about this puzzle every week, the Indie Weekend mag puzzle changes its name! It turns out that this is the second name change. … Read more >>
Independent 6304 / Nimrod – Only 7 As
Solving time 8:48 As soon as you see the 8-block black lumps in the NE and SW corners you know something’s up, and the huge gap at the bottom of the across clues … Read more >>
Guardian 23,957 / Araucaria – a Midwinter Day’s Puzzle
Solving time 33:50 It’s good to be writing our first posting about a kind of puzzle I’ve looked forward to ever since I started solving cryptic crosswords. Back in the late 1970s, when … Read more >>