Never knowingly undersolved
A very entertaining and enjoyable puzzle which was accessible but certainly no gimme. There were some excellent clues (10 and 11 were both quite inventive). 27 was really the only clue that required … Read more >>
(Please click here for this same blog but with a picture quiz added. Please do NOT post hereinbelow any comment relating to the picture quiz. Thank you.) As commented by Pee Dee last … Read more >>
A Saturday in May – a tussle with Nestor. Always a taxing time Lots of interesting clues from Nestor. Certainly not a run of the mill crossword – barely a simple clue in … Read more >>
Phi-day again, and the usual well-crafted puzzle. We always look for a theme or nina in Phi’s puzzles, but initially we couldn’t see either in this one. However, Phi is playing … Read more >>
Klingsor has provided us with our cruciverbal workout this Thursday. I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle, finding it medium-to-hard on the difficulty scale and definitely a puzzle that I had to chip away at, … Read more >>
Dac’s strength lies in his very subtle misdirection through the surface reading of his clues. The wordplay in Dac’s clues is very rarely complex although there were a couple of … Read more >>
Anax usually appears on Saturdays in the Independent, or so it seems, but he has put in a welcome weekday appearance today. This is the usual excellent production (I would say that wouldn’t I, since he may well be at the S&B later today; but of course it’s true). It wasn’t at all easy, but Anax seldom is; I think I’ve just about understood everything, but there are one or two slightly dodgy parsings which I trust will be explained properly by someone.
Definitions underlined.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water … … and that we were all done and dusted with the 2015 election, along comes Knut with a … Read more >>
A good and very enjoyable Sunday puzzle that I found trickier than usual. I think that the general level of difficulty of the IoS has gone up over the time I have been blogging it. I wonder if this is editorial policy or just random variation? Possibly just a natural decline in my faculties.
Enjoyable – and topical? – fare from Morph for this week’s Prize puzzle… At the end of a 9A TUMULT-uous week in British politics, there seemed to be subliminal references all over this. … Read more >>
Today saw my monthly Friday encounter with Phi. I found this to be a medium-difficulty Phi puzzle. I made steady progress through it from the start almost to the finish, faltering only in … Read more >>
Tyrus has given us a good challenge today with only one entry that I don’t remember coming across before. The one word that was new to me was ALAMEDA at … Read more >>
I am usually trying to write a clue in some clue-writing competition or other; and it is nearly always tortuous. In Dac’s case none of his clues are tortuous: they all seem to be perfectly natural, and they always have a simple and strong surface. Why it should be that the words Dac clues are so different from those that I try to clue is beyond me. Actually they’re not: it’s just that he is rather better at it than I am.
Definitions underlined.
As soon as we saw that it was Scorpion today, we thought there might be a hidden theme. When we started looking at the clues, it was clear that there was a … Read more >>