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 of weeks, lost my original copy, and when I tried again I got through it in a single session. This was just after I’d blogged Puck’s contraversial SpongeBob Squarepants puzzle, so perhaps I was more attuned to Puckishness. The theme is rather cryptically explained in the preamble: “Down solutions must be suitably 14 (TAILORED) in order to be 17, not briefly edited, (BLESSED less ED, so “B-LESS”) before being inserted in the grid.” The last sentence (”Three across clues have solutions that are 17 (BLESSED) and are not further defined.”) refers to three items from the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the Peacemakers/Meek/Pure of heart” (but not the Cheesemakers). In the solutions below I’ve shown the the unmodified version of the downs. The entries in the diagram have the letter B removed wherever it occurs.

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Oops! I should have assigned this for blogging, but have been somewhat preoccupied. So here’s a very quick, last-minute attempt at a blog. The deadline was orginally given as 6 February, but the solution is already available on the Guardian website.

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I have now published the blog — see above.

As Geniuses go, this was on the easy side — the preamble was explicit about what needed to be done, and the clues were pretty straightforward. For those who missed the preamble, which apparently was missing at first, it said: ‘Nine solutions must be converted into a contradictory word with the same number of letters before entry into the grid’.

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Four symphonies with nicknames provide the theme for this puzzle: the undefined anagrams lead to the composer (with a missing letter) and the nickname. The “clue of sorts” given by the missing letter is that its position is the number of the symphony: for example, the Eroica is Beethoven’s 3rd, so the 3rd letter of BEETHOVEN is omitted (of course it’s hard to tell in that example!) Perhaps surprisingly, the four symphonies involve only two numbers: two thirds and two fourths. The normal clues were mostly straightforward (in contrast to the ferociously hard Araucaria puzzle last month), with just a couple of obscure answers causing some difficulties, though even they were guessable thanks to Pasquale’s usual sound clueing.

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I found this extremely tough, unlike some of the earlier offerings in the Genius series. I still have a problem explaining a few of the clues. The main difficulty was simply the obscurity of some of the words used, with less help than usual from checking letters because of the nature of the puzzle. Only a few clues were numbered; others had to be inserted where they would fit, like an alphabetical jigsaw. This aspect didn’t prove too difficult, although I didn’t understand why the instructions referred to clues having “their indicated place at the table”. For a while I thought that there might be some food-related theme but if so, I still can’t see it. Read the rest of this entry »

This felt a little like a puzzle designed to test out a thematic entry technique. The clues were good, and the process of making new words by moving one letter produced some intriguing results and was, in some cases, surprisingly hard to spot. But at the end of it the moved letters spelt out ’redistribution’, which, while an accurate description of what one had done, was slightly underwhelming as a final step.  Original answers first.

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A tough challenge from Paul that took me several sessions to complete, though looking back at it now there’s not much that seems particularly obscure or difficult. The crucial 8dn was actually one of the last clues I solved, but I worked out the gimmick – that alternate rows of across answers are entered from right to left – from finding that the answers were the right length for the spaces, but didn’t match the crossing letters.

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A Genius of average difficulty from Pasquale. Once I had spotted how it worked, I solved it without problems. Having mislaid my solved copy, I had to do it again, and got through it pretty rapidly second time around.

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This was, I think, the hardest Genius puzzle since the Guardian site became freely available. I only managed to solve just over a third of the clues in the first session and then got a few more each day during the next couple of days or so when revisiting the puzzle. Being able to make a start on grid entry would have been greatly helped by solving 5d but I did not get this one until much later.

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This was a entertaining, but aggressive crossword that took longer than it should have because I had  the wrong answer at 18d (KEG) for a while.  I thought to begin with that 18d was TUN (a large cask, sounds like [say] a ton weight), so I was wondering about the meaning of the middle letters of ACCRINGTON STANLEY for some time.  Eventually the penny dropped and the words PEN, POCKET, STANLEY and BREAD made some sense, following on from the one unadjusted across answer at 16a GET THE KNIVES OUT.  All types of knives had to be removed from the other across answers to make them fit the grid. I think that all the various knives were well known.

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Apologies for being late with this.

A really enjoyable challenge from Brummie formed the April Genius puzzle and one which required wits to be kept about one at all times.

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I found this to be the toughest Genius in a while, but very satisfying to solve. In each of the clues which must be changed, I have listed the clued answer first and then the version which should be entered into the grid. The changed letters spell out THE METAMOROPHOSIS and the letters across the middle line spell out GREGOR, so the question was whether to change that to BEETLE or INSECT. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has “insect” in its translation of the first line.

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I am standing in at the last moment so it is now over a month since I completed this puzzle and therefore I don’t remember too much about the detail, though writing the blog has brought back some pleasant memories. What I do recall though is that, as usual, it was an enjoyable puzzle from Paul.

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The hidden theme of this excellent crossword is “Composers”: most uses of the letter C in the clues should be read as “composer” for the clue to make sense. This perhaps wasn’t as tricky as the last couple of Genius puzzles, but a good challenge nonetheless. (To give credit where it’s due, solving this was a joint effort between me and my partner.) Read the rest of this entry »

I found this puzzle fun to do, once I got the hang of how it worked. In each across clue, the definition gives a word containing either ASS, PIG, EWE or CAT; the subsidiary part gives a non-word (in most cases) with a different one of the animals; before writing it in the grid, you need to change the animal yet again.

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Another BOB DYLAN crossword, overlapping a recent Listener, although I am not sure why the focus was on Dylan in November. It’s not his birthday nor any other particular anniversary that I can detect.

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After two very tough offerings from Paul and Brummie, this required very little genius in either solving the clues or fitting the answers into the grid. An enjoyable enough puzzle, and a clever feat of construction, but rather a disappointment from a solver’s point of view. I very quickly solved all but a few of the clues, and found there was only one possible way to fit the 11-letter answers into the grid. After that filling in the rest and solving the remaining clues was a formality. Hugh Stephenson’s newsletter bemoans the fact that there were very few entries for September’s Genius, despite it being the first under the free service: I suspect there may be quite a lot more for this one.

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As a newcomer to the Genius since the site went free, I found this OK but a little – not hard to get going with, but tough to finish because the entry method for the thematic clues, though good, left you with the kind of ambiguities a definiton-only puzzle would (I love cryptics, they;re so much easier!) . The final curtain, as it were, was little underwhelming, and I felt that the whole synonym idea could have been deployed to better purpose. The eight thematic clues are asterisked, two theme words in bold.

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Although I’ve been a subscriber to the Guardian crossword website for some years now, this
is the first time that I’ve attempted a Genius crossword.  Having managed to complete this
one without too much difficulty (with one exception) I’m kicking myself for not having done
them previously.  Solving time was about a day (not spent exclusively on it).

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A challenging solve, especially for those unfamiliar with Paul’s somewhat libertarian approach; but plenty of fun, and I got through it pretty quickly once I’d solved about four.

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There were three kinds of clue here:
13 were ‘beset by inflation’ — they each included an extra letter.
13 were ‘beset by recession’ — a character string (not necessarily a whole word) within the clue needed to be reversed before solving.
The rest were normal, but their solutions had to ‘suffer property repossessions’ before being entered in the grid. This meant that a word for a property had to be removed. Nice idea, though I think some were a touch sub-prime execution-wise, when what was omitted was half of a two-word phrase (although, to be fair, at least all entries were proper words).

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Solving time: 24 minutes.

 One I tackled while in hospital.  Although it wasn’t the most satisfying of puzzles, it held me while I worked out whether each of the homophone double answers could be worse than the previous one.  The preamble called them “exact or cheeky”; I could think of alternative names for them, most would be unprintable here.

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When I first downloaded this one, it lacked a preamble. Having solved it without one (not boasting or anything!), I returned to the website, where a brief preamble had been added. The principle, also the answer to 10,17,12,18, is the second part of: “It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen” — a quotation from the physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, himself (via a namesake) the answer to 13ac.

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The theme required solutions to be adapted before entry but said nothing of the clues. Noticing that the answer lengths were one or two less than the grid lengths this suggested some addition to each answer as it was entered into the grid. Treating the clues as normal I solved a few intersecting clues cold. After three of four from the top corner it stood out that each answer so far contained a double-you and that the only way to get the words to fit the grid was to do something with these double-yous. Unfortunately 1a and 1d both went in, and remained real words, if the W became a QU. This didn’t work for the next couple of answers!

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