Never knowingly undersolved
Azed gives us a jigsaw about every two years, and by the luck of the draw I also blogged the last one. As I said then, my first step with these is to … Read more >>
I found this quite tricky, especially on the left-hand side of the grid. I spent a lot of time trawling Chambers to make progress there.
This week’s plain puzzle contained several clues that would not be out of place in a daily cryptic.
As ever, a well constructed puzzle from Azed. There are a couple of clues where I am not entirely sure of the wordplay, indeed for 16 across [SEMPER] I really … Read more >>
A relatively gentle exercise that didn’t require too many trips to Chambers. I got stuck though on the NE corner for a long time (as long as the rest of the puzzle took) … Read more >>
The first of Azed’s Letters Latent puzzles since VE(S)TAL in 2009. I won’t give the complete preamble since you have no doubt already seen it, but letters are missing from each answer whenever they occur and these missing letters make an appropriate seasonal quotation. The definition is to the whole word, the subsidiary indication to the word with letters missing. Two words are missing from this quotation and the first one is clued like all the rest in the puzzle; the second one is the competition clue-word.
In the answers I have given the omitted letters in lower-case.
The quotation (which I have to admit to finding using Google) was from Ernest Dowson: ‘pale amber sunlight falls across the [reddening October] trees’.
As with all Azed’s specials, this was much enjoyed.
I thought I was off to a good start with this when I got all four of the long answers around the edges (including 34a by some inspired guesswork). I then polished off … Read more >>
A unusual grid from AZED this week.
A good puzzle for those who haven’t tackled an Azed before, with several clues that wouldn’t be out of place in a daily cryptic puzzle.
We had a plain competition Azed this week where one of the clues was a simple definition that yielded an entry to be clued as part of the competition Bloggers over the … Read more >>
Fairly straightforward from the master. Managed to solve in less than 2 hours (with frequent trips to TBRB). Definitions underlined. Across 1 Confirmed philistine, I’m backward, unaccompanied by substance (10) MI,SOLO,GIST … Read more >>
Although the structure of most of these clues is fairly straightforward, as witness the number of them that can be parsed in one bit, I found this one of Azed’s harder crosswords, with many difficult words and shades of meaning. Coomassie blue and makunouchi aren’t things I talk about every day. Indeed there are red squiggly lines under two of these words and they won’t go away.
As usual I’m not going to explain all these difficult words. I don’t want to be up all night.
Definitions underlined.
I’ve never been a great fan of DLM (definition and letter-mixture) puzzles: I tend to find them very hard to get started on, but once even a couple of answers are in it … Read more >>
My first Azed puzzle as a regular blogger entailing a very enjoyable trawl though Chambers. The great thing about blogging an Azed puzzle is that it gives me the perfect excuse to spend the afternoon reading the dictionary without attracting unwelcome comments about ‘needing to get a life’ etc. Thank you Azed.
A plain competition puzzle this month after the intricacies of July’s competition.