Never knowingly undersolved
mc_rapper67 Bit of a quick last-minute post, so apologies for any typos or missed nuances. My first Phi blog, and I was a bit wary as I have enjoyed solving/attempting many difficult Independent cryptics and Inquisitors … Read more >>
That title, a grid with a big ‘X’ in the middle, and a preamble indicating that there were eight clashing cells, extra letters in word play would lead to instructions, and a ‘route’ to be … Read more >>
No fancy themes, or ninas, from Bannsider this week – or at least none that I could find! Just a good old-fashioned hard mental workout for a Saturday morning. Oh, and a bit of … Read more >>
A tasty treat of a puzzle – maybe at the easier end of the EV spectrum, once the nicely topical theme had been cracked. The solver was to find four unclued entries making … Read more >>
A nicely constructed and clued puzzle, with some wonderfully diverting surface readings, and a little theme-ette (nina?) woven in as well. The theme, not indicated by any preamble, but alluded to by the … Read more >>
Several of the classic components of an EV on display here – extra letters/words in clues building a thematic sentence (minus one key word), some entries (approximately half) reversed in the grid, and … Read more >>
This is my first Indy blog – and I believe there is another new starter next week – so ‘thank-you’ to the Saturday Indy team for letting a couple of newcomers into the … Read more >>
After a few weeks of seasonal/festive-themed EVs, we are back to business with a ‘normal’ EV – but no less enyoyable for that! A fiendish looking preamble – with ALL answers entered ‘cyclically’ … Read more >>
Cold comfort, indeed – a wonderfully themed EV for the weather at the time! The preamble seemed fairly complex – twenty answers entered ‘in a certain way’, most clues containing a misprint – … Read more >>
A fellow EV blogger recently mused on the ‘blogger’s nightmare’ of being allocated a puzzle he/she can’t get to the bottom of. Well, here’s an example (unless the penny drops some time between writing … Read more >>
With ‘pencil recommended, at first’ and ‘upheaval’ threatened, I braced myself for some serious re-engineering of the grid post-solving…but in the end there was a relatively simple, but cleverly constructed, twist to the tale… … Read more >>
I ‘missed the boat’ at first on this one – thinking it was referring to ‘grockles’, a mildly derogatory term for incomer, or tourist, in some parts of the UK, so I was … Read more >>
The full 225 letters this week (unusual for an EV recently?), so value for money from Kruger, and more to blog for your’s truly…but, to paraphrase from John Cleese’s ‘great actor’ in the … Read more >>
An ‘EV’ puzzle in more ways than one, as it turned out! Bit of a complicated preamble – the solver is searching for a ‘gang of four’ who aren’t actually in the grid, … Read more >>
I came to this EV tired and jaded after a long weekend away golfing and drinking…(or was that the other way around?)…not having done a crossword of any form for 4 days – … Read more >>