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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
A satisfying puzzle from our Monday Maestro. Just one clue, 29ac, may perhaps hold you up if you haven’t come across the ploy before.
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Does anybody else who uses ScrewedUp have a feeling of deja vu? I printed out the Sunday Quick Crossword No. 79 and realised that it was exactly the same as last Sunday’s No. 78. I hope the one in the newspaper is different.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **/*** - Enjoyment ****
Being used to the style of our Sunday setter I found this to be quite easy – those less familiar may take longer, hence the dual difficulty rating. Either way, it is well worth the effort.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** - Enjoyment ***
This week we have a much better puzzle to solve. OK, there’s a couple of places and a boy’s name, but they don’t detract from the overall enjoyment. The clues are all fair, with a few smiles along the way. Like several other Saturday puzzles, this one is pangrammatic – which means it contains all 26 letters of the alphabet – and this can help you solve those last few clues.
Don’t forget that you can give your assessment of the puzzle. Five stars if you thought it was great, one if you hated it, four, three or two if it was somewhere in between.
As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, I will select a few of the better clues and provide hints for them. A full review of this puzzle will be published on Thursday, 12th November.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** - Enjoyment ****
Quite tricky for me, this one – possibly the hardest Sunday puzzle for me since I started blogging them, though partly from one of those unfortunate groupings of answers that were hard for me – 16D, 17D, 20A, 27A. If one of these had been in each 20A, they would have caused far less trouble! Another source of difficulty might be the simple fact that every answer except 14D is a single word – this seems to make cheap guessed answers harder to come by. (As usual, I’m writing this before seeing what anyone said on the day, so look forward to finding “This was a doddle” comments when I do …)
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** - Enjoyment ***
There’s usually a sense of dread on seeing a clue-set littered with “See x” and numerical references, and a pre-solve reading of these made me fear the worst; I think there were just two answers spotted. As it turned out, this was a fairly relaxing solve, not too difficult and – very strangely – quite muted in terms of Elgar’s usual LOL clues.
As I start the write-up there are a number of clues whose wordplay I only tried to work out after solving, not always with success. Part of Elgar’s unique brilliance is his libertarian playfulness, and he gets away with stuff that other setters probably wouldn’t.
My favourite clues are shown in blue text.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****
The Friday Cryptic is often the highlight of the week and, once again, Giovanni does not disappoint. It’s full of entertaining clues, but I did find it quite tricky – let us know whether you agree or not!
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** - Enjoyment *
Only the Telegraph, among quality dailies, would have a prize puzzle that is this easy.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** - Enjoyment ****
I bet you were all wondering where Mynot would go next, having completed a series of vowel-inspired puzzles, well now we know he has invited us all to a Night at the Opera, but without the Marx Brothers.
I must admit that when I saw the convoluted clueing on this puzzle I felt like tossing it in the cyber-bin. I persevered with it, and ended up quite enjoying the result. It is very important to latch on to the theme quickly, and an inspired guess at the 1a / 28a coupling, based on just three checking letters was the key for me, even though my first guess of “clue” for 19a proved to be incorrect.
I have just had an email from Tilsit. The last I heard was that he had lost his dongle – sounds like the title of a Charlie Drake song – so he must have now found it!!
Leave a comment telling us what you thought. You can also add your assessment by selecting from one to five stars at the bottom of the post.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** - Enjoyment ***
Another “exactly what it says on the tin” crossword from J. Unlike last week, I can’t find anything in this to grumble about.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
So you’ve raced through today’s Cryptic in record time and you’re looking for something a bit more challenging, but you’re wary of trying the Toughie because you think it will be beyond you? Think again, today’s puzzle is a pussycat, certainly no more difficult than an average Telegraph Cryptic, and easier, in my opinion, than yesterday’s Cryptic. If you’ve never tried a Toughie this is the one to start with.
It’s a perfectly good puzzle with some well-constructed and entertaining clues, but I do feel that the Telegraph is verging on a contravention of the Trades Description Act in describing it as the toughest puzzle on Fleet Street and “our most devious cryptic puzzle ever”. Certainly some Toughies fall into that category, but this one? – no.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** - Enjoyment **
Tilsit would rather go back to see the lovely nurses in the Calderdale Royal Hospital than do today’s puzzle, and I don’t blame him. It was very easy and the newer solvers should enjoy finishing it. For the rest of us it offered very little.
You can add your assessment by selecting from one to five stars at the bottom of the post.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** - Enjoyment ***
Another Tuesday Toughie that’s worth having a go at. There are several anagrams, and some easy cryptic definitions and other clues to get you going. Then you can take a bit more time with some of the more difficult clues. All in all it should prove to be an enjoyable adventure. Especially if you tried to tackle last Friday’s Toughie equivalent of Everest.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ***
I thought that this was a bit harder than the usual Ray T puzzle when I did it in the early hours (but that may have been due to a moderate intake of Shiraz!), so I’ve given it 4 stars for difficulty. I expect that you’ll all tell me now that it was the easiest puzzle all year!!
It has all the Ray T trademarks – single word answers and definitions where you keep having to ask yourself “in what sense does x mean y?”.
Let’s see if we can get a bumper crop of comments today. We particularly want to hear from those readers who have yet to introduce themselves – we’re a friendly bunch and we won’t bite – it really doesn’t matter whether you’ve been solving crosswords for sixty years or have only just started!
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