Hihoba

I was a bit worried by a long rubric with drawing instructions: Each across clue and ten down clues contain an extra letter to be discarded before solving. The across letters in clue … Read more >>

An alphabetical jigsaw this week from Charybdis, and a very good one too! An amazing grid construction. The rubric read: Answers fit in the grid jigsaw-wise. Unnumbered clues are arranged in alphabetical order of … Read more >>

The rubric read: One answer is not to be entered in the grid. Answers to four clues which lack definitions are thematic. Solver must highlight two other normally clued entries to complete a … Read more >>

Quite a short preamble this week: “Six features in the final grid are thematically positioned in straight lines and must be highlighted. The six unclued entries already highlighted give hints at the theme: … Read more >>

This blog will be the first one to appear in 2015, so a Happy New Year to all our solvers. We bloggers love to read your comments and appreciate your corrections when we … Read more >>

Welcome S.M.E.R.S.H. (unless you are someone else disguised as the Soviet CIA). What a crossword! I counted 18 answers (almost half!) which were words I’d never heard of or meanings I’d never imagined, … Read more >>

The rubric stated: Corrections to single-letter misprints in the definitions of eleven clues give a phrase which explains how some answers are to be modified before entry, in the manner perhaps exhibited by the … Read more >>

This one was not so difficult as the last masterpiece of misdirection we had to blog (Soprano by Pointer) where we had to be corrected by johnsurdy!     I (Hi) was in Istanbul … Read more >>

This was the first offering from Pointer, and a very nice puzzle it was too. The preamble was pretty complex: The completed grid relates to a scene of a drama first produced on … Read more >>

I was expecting an easy one after the succession of high Moh (hardness scale) Inquisitors lately. No such luck! A long rubric: Clockwise round the perimeter run a slogan (3 words) and an associated … Read more >>

A glance at the grid, and I expected an alphabetical jigsaw, but the rubric told us otherwise: Clues are presented in normal order, across followed by down, but six entries forming most of … Read more >>

I found this a bit of a struggle! Nice theme, but well hidden and dependent on knowledge that I, for one, could only come by via a Wikipedia article. The last time we … Read more >>

A short preamble told us we had some “abbreviation” to do, and enter two letters in lower case. In each clue the wordplay yields an extra letter not to be entered in the … Read more >>

The grid was only 11×11, there were no extra or missing letters, no hidden messages, just six unclued entries and two hidden words to find. I found it pretty easy, despite the longish … Read more >>