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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
For some reason I lost interest half-way through this puzzle. I persevered and had little difficulty in finishing it but some of the wordplay took a bit of working out. Maybe I’m having an off day.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ***
A few tricky down answers at the end pushed my time into the 4* difficulty zone. I’ll be interested to here whether other solvers had problems or whether I was having an off-day.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
On first read-through I thought that this was going to be a stinker but I actually got through it in average time for a Wednesday. There are two themes based on two distinct meanings of 1a – it wasn’t until I came to write the blog that I realised that the setter had helpfully differentiated between the two by putting one set of references in quotes (i.e. ‘1ac’) and the other without quotes. Thanks to Firefly for the entertainment.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
Greetings from the Calder Valley! We end the Toughie week with a visit from Firefly. I found this very much a curate’s egg of a puzzle with some really nice stuff but one or two clues that caused some tooth-sucking. Whether it was because we were spoiled with Micawber and Dada’s fine puzzles over the past couple of days, but this didn’t quite hit the mark for me. The puzzle seems to have a number of famous names as answers, but I’m not sure this is a theme as such.
The other reason this puzzle was rather odd for me was that I virtually started at the bottom of the grid and worked my way up. At one point, I had the entire bottom half completed with one answer in the top half. In fact the top half took me over twice as long as the bottom half.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ***
This is an enjoyable but fairly meaty Toughie – I struggled with the SE corner where the last few clues took me as long as the rest of the puzzle put together. The last time I blogged a Firefly Toughie I missed the fairly obvious theme – I’ve looked a bit harder at this one but can’t spot anything (famous last words). Thanks to Firefly for the entertainment.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
We’ve had a game of musical chairs this morning and I’ve ended up in Tilsit’s seat while he’s detained in hospital – get well soon, Tilsit!
I wasn’t overly impressed with this for a Friday Toughie. There’s not too much sparkle and some of the clues seem a bit forced. A basic knowledge of French helps.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***** – Enjoyment ****
The quiz team that I play for was in action yesterday. At one point we had to answer three questions on centenarians. One of these included the quote at 21,25,13,22 and the answer was 1 across. This newly-acquired knowledge enabled me to get off to a flying start on this puzzle and I made steady but somewhat slow progress until I was left with two to do. I eventually managed 19 across but I don’t think I would ever have come up with the answer to 9 down without using solver aids. These two clues meant that I had to assign 5* for difficulty.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
Greetings from the Calder Valley and it’s time for a Friday Firefly.
I found the puzzle to be of the usual standard from our setter with some good whimsical clues, and a theme (9 across) to some of the answers, although its use did feel a bit odd at times. At first I assumed that I was looking for synonyms for the expression, but this wasn’t the case. In most cases it was telling you to anagram the first half of the answer, using the second half as an indicator as such. One of the answers asked you to add the theme answer and then remove half of it, which struck me as a bit contrived. Quite a few of the clues today require you to take something (usually an abbreviation) away from a definition of a word.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Greetings from the Calder Valley. Our Friday Fiend is Firefly who has produced an interesting and challenging puzzle that will delight some, and perhaps infuriate others. I found it more enjoyable than some of his recent offerings but I found a couple of clues that could only be solved once I had the answer, which isn’t the point of a crossword, as far as I am aware, in other words a bit too clever for their own good. I’d be interested to see if anyone managed to solve 12 across without getting all the intersecting letters. Lots of clever surface readings but again the odd one that doesn’t quite work for me.
I looked around for a theme, or a Nina, especially given the grid used, but couldn’t see anything other than a linked clue.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Greetings from the Calder Valley! The sun is cracking the flags here in Hebden Bridge and we have a nice benign puzzle to begin the weekend from Firefly. I got off to the wrong start by thinking that 5 down was a simple anagram and this blocked me for a short while, but once I realised I had this answer wrong, the puzzle fell into place.
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