Never knowingly undersolved
When I first solved The Listener crossword I was pleased with myself, then went to a website that discussed it and everyone said how easy this particular puzzle was. This was rather dispiriting … Read more >>
A gentle start to the Azed year: I don’t time myself, but I think I finished this (apart from checking a couple of stragglers in Chambers) in less than half an hour. As … Read more >>
This Christmas puzzle employs a device that I don’t remember Azed using before. The special instructions state: “In the completed diagram, eight words in jumbled form may be seen radiating from and including the central square, which must be deduced”.
I enjoyed this one very much. The dictionary got off lightly this time as I seemed to know (or at least vaguely remember) most of the words here, unusual for me. Thank you Azed.
An Azed plain puzzle this week This was a fairly typical Azed. The entries were the usual result of Azed’s trawl through the dictionary looking for a mix of well … Read more >>
Making do without Paul’s awesome crossword utility is hard… but I somehow managed. Kind of a medium level difficulty Azed — usual Chambers trawling. There’s one wordplay that I’m unsure of — and a few … Read more >>
Being of a pedantic turn, I was struck by several little things that weren’t quite right here: 19dn is given as (6) when it is (7); 22dn is given as 23dn; whoever typed out … Read more >>
Mostly fairly easy on the Azed scale, though I struggled with the intersecting 4-letter words at 27d and 32a, which had rather unhelpful checked letters (?OA? and ?A?E), and quite tricky clues. Thanks … Read more >>
The instructions for this excellent puzzle state:
Each of the across clues contains a misprint of one letter, always occurring in the definition part. Answers should be entered correctly spelt. Down clues are normal but their answers are to be entered with a misprint of one letter only in each, always in a checked position. These misprints correspond to the misprints in the across clues, in clue order, i.e. 1 Across/1 Down, 6 Across/2 Down … 33 Across/28 Down. No more than one letter in any across answer forms the misprint in a down entry.
A 13 by 11 grid for this week’s plain Azed puzzle. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, I can’t include a picture of the completed puzzle.
An Azed Competition puzzle this week but it was a plain one. There is one clue for which I can’t even begin to see the word play and that’s 12 … Read more >>
This is something Azed only occasionally does, to have one of his specials on a non-clue-setting-competition day. I don’t know how many solvers there are who do the n-c-s-c puzzles but not the c-s-c ones, … Read more >>
By the “breakfast test” this counted as quite easy on the Azed spectrum, even though in retrospect it seems to have quite a high proportion of unfamiliar words. Unusually, there are only 34 … Read more >>
There were several hidden word clues in here and one or two straightforward anagrams. These got me off to a flying start but once the the ‘gifts’ had petered out I stuggled. Quite hard I thought. Thanks Azed.