Guardian Genius

I made rather heavy weather of this one, needing several sessions over the month to finish it. Even with some lucky guessing it took me a while to get the full “ennobling instruction” … Read more >>

Lavatch  is a setter whose puzzles (in this series anyway) always seem to involve having to change the word before entry in the grid.  This time the down clues all included a name … Read more >>

The preamble told us that “Each solution contains a two-letter symbol for a chemical element, which needs to be transmuted into another before it is entered in the grid. Each transmutation changes both … Read more >>

This was a fun Genius puzzle, we thought, and quite doable once you untangled the rubric. There were plenty of smiles for me, particularly in how the missing letters changed the meaning of … Read more >>

Had I known that I was going to end up covering this puzzle I would have written the blog immediately after solving it. As it is, a month has gone by and my … Read more >>

Enigmatist is one of the most prolific crossword setters and has a knack of introducing new ideas and twists into his puzzles.  I think this was probably one of the more offbeat of … Read more >>

Well, I must say these Genius puzzles vary a lot in difficulty. After two hard ones from Araucaria and Tramp, I found this one from Crucible hardly more difficult than a standard daily … Read more >>

It was my privilege to blog Tramp’s first published puzzle (I think) which appeared in this series six months ago (Genius 91).  Since then he has published non-prize cryptics in the Guardian (and … Read more >>

To say that I struggled with this one would be an understatement. I can usually finish a Genius in under an hour but this time it was nearly that long per clue. Perseverance … Read more >>

A very clever puzzle from Lavatch. Below I’ve set out the clues with the answers they directly lead to, and below that I’ll explain what has to be done to them to get … Read more >>

Well, I thought I was getting on just fine with this puzzle, but I was completely stuck on two answers, 17a and 21a. None of my resources — dictionaries, word lists, TEA, Google, … Read more >>

In the preamble we were told that seven clues require ill-advised exchanges before solutions are entered in the grid.  The resulting solutions are non-words.  In these seven clues, the definitions (indicated by the … Read more >>

(Sorry for the late posting – last minute delays writing this up due to work commitments etc) Maybe it’s just me, but I think the Genius puzzles are getting generally harder. Number 91 … Read more >>

Solving time : about a day and a half. I found this hard, partly because of a grammatical error in the instructions which made them more obscure than was necessary. There were two … Read more >>

I am a last minute stand-in and it may be difficult for me to remember what I did a month ago, particularly with the festivities in between, so please excuse any errors or … Read more >>