Never knowingly undersolved
It’s time for my biannual Guardian Genius blog and this time Vlad is the setter The preamble stated "Fourteen solutions are derived from seven common word pairs, each having a … Read more >>
It’s always a bit worrying for a blogger to see Enigmatist’s name on a puzzle, especially a Genius, but here I was lucky to spot the theme almost immediately, when I tentatively solved … Read more >>
A new setter, Soup, and a novel device in a puzzle which proved to be much easier than last month’s offering, but which unfortunately was beset with technical problems.
The preamble states that: In one way or another 20,9 is missing from each clue. Our first one in was 21d – INNARDS which actually turned out to be incorrect but it took … Read more >>
Hello all, This one took me a few sittings, as should be the case. Enjoyable. As ever, I’m amazed by the grid constructions for puzzles like this. I found myself singing the bridge to this song … Read more >>
A ‘centripetal’ jigsaw, with 20 clues in a mystery sequence, two unclued ‘kitchen items’, and a solitary square in the middle to be deduced as an ‘appropriate’ Roman numeral. Help! Stop the world, … Read more >>
The preamble for this Genius puzzle was fairly short and told us… that each of the 26 solutions begins with a different letter, which is ignored in its clue. The … Read more >>
An apparently anonymous puzzle for July, offering an unusual twist on a familiar device. As Gaufrid pointed out to me, the identity of the setter was in fact available by doing an archive search, but not on the page where the puzzle itself was to be found.
The preamble states that: Each clue contains a one word surplus to requirements. The initial letters of these words, in clue order spell out a group, followed by the title of one of … Read more >>
A tricky letters latent puzzle from Monk.
The preamble for Genius 142, when you can work your way through the hotch-potch of ‘temporary’ (?) workarounds the Grauniad have built around this ‘non-standard’ puzzle which has been there for 10-plus years, … Read more >>
The preamble told us that in 11 clues the wordplay produces a letter surplus to the solution. In order, these 11 letters provide a cryptic definition for 10 other solutions, represented in their … Read more >>
The special instructions seemed vaguely familiar, and after a bit of searching I found that the idea of the definition applying to the answer of a different clue was used a couple of … Read more >>
I should never have said that the December Genius was easier than the Christmas special puzzle; this Genius was much harder than December’s.