July 19, 2024 – Big Dave's Crossword Blog

Toughie 3308

Toughie No 3308 by Osmosis
Hints and tips by Gazza

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BD Rating – Difficulty ****Enjoyment ****

Osmosis has taken a leaf out of Beam’s book and given us a very enjoyable anagram-less puzzle. Thanks to him.

There’s a lot of cleverness on view in the grid. For a start we have (almost) a double pangram – there are no Hs but two of them are visible in the make-up of the grid. Also, we only have a single W but we do have a couple of spare Us (i.e. a double-U). Finally, and I don’t know how significant this is, several pairs of the higher scoring Scrabble letters appear separated by a single letter in the four quadrants (i.e. going clockwise from top-left  Q?Q, X?X, Z?Z and J?J).
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DT 30670

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 30670

Hints and tips by Mr K

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BD Rating  -  Difficulty *** Enjoyment ***

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Friday. It was a very long day in the lab today, so I’m afraid that once again I had no time to search for quality cat pics. However, since the commentariat did so well at providing pics last week, I’m hoping that readers will step up once again with suitable illustrations.  Continue reading "DT 30670"