Guardian Genius

Well, I thought I was getting on just fine with this puzzle, but I was completely stuck on two answers, 17a and 21a. None of my resources — dictionaries, word lists, TEA, Google, … Read more >>

In the preamble we were told that seven clues require ill-advised exchanges before solutions are entered in the grid.  The resulting solutions are non-words.  In these seven clues, the definitions (indicated by the … Read more >>

(Sorry for the late posting – last minute delays writing this up due to work commitments etc) Maybe it’s just me, but I think the Genius puzzles are getting generally harder. Number 91 … Read more >>

Solving time : about a day and a half. I found this hard, partly because of a grammatical error in the instructions which made them more obscure than was necessary. There were two … Read more >>

I am a last minute stand-in and it may be difficult for me to remember what I did a month ago, particularly with the festivities in between, so please excuse any errors or … Read more >>

A very nicely constructed crossword, with a “word chain” (missing alternate links) running through the 6 letter answers. The complete chain (with the missing links emphasized) is: 1d BOTHER / HERBAL / 3d … Read more >>

Apologies for the late appearance of a post for this puzzle. The scheduled blogger forgot that it was her turn and did not solve it so I am standing in at the last … Read more >>

Six months have passed, so it must be my turn to blog a Guardian Genius again.   I have solved one or two Lavatch puzzles in The Listener so I knew this would … Read more >>

The special instructions were quite clear, but it took a few readings, and a few answers, beofre I fully got the sense of them. Apart from that, this puzzle turned out less daunting … Read more >>

I found this easier than some recent Genius puzzles. There was only one obscure word and most of the clues were fairly straightforward. The requirement here was to identify how the answers to … Read more >>

This month’s theme involved removing words from a number of across clues and then putting anagrams of them in some of the down clues. Two further unclued entries were to be found by … Read more >>

We found it tough to get going with this puzzle, but once we’d got the theme of 7-letter characters from Shakespeare, and, I’m afraid to say, resorted to using Wikipedia’s lists from A … Read more >>

An entertaining puzzle from Lavatch — and not too difficult once you spotted what was happening. Where a clash occurred, you needed to 1a,25 — use the letter alphabetically half-way between the two … Read more >>

It’s nearly a year since I blogged a Genius and it clearly hasn’t got any easier.  This one took me an age to get into, but eventually I got a chink of light … Read more >>

I struggled with this puzzle when I first tried it, though getting enough down answers to guess that they all had one or more Bs missing. Then I left it for a couple … Read more >>