Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
A pretty sound puzzle of moderate difficulty. No grid gripes, no geography, no arbitary people. Rejoice! Well, there are some gripes below but it feels like fewer than usual.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
An extra enjoyment star as I liked this more than most Saturday puzzles. The grid is sound with one small reservation – the NW and SE corners are a bit isolated, and swapping the lengths of 12 and 13 (and of course 22 and 23) would fix this. There are no placename answers, just a couple of islands in wordplay. There are still arbitrary people – three ladies (Anne, Crystal, Lizzie) and one gent (Gus). There are a few tricky answer words, including 6D and 11A, so their crossing might be a tricky area. Surface meanings are mostly good, and I only found four cases of “surface padding”. Curiously, all the 3-letter answers have a U in the middle, and none of them have to – I don’t know whether this is significant.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
A very straightforward puzzle with only a couple of points to delay experienced solvers. One new answer for me, and only a few puzzling clues. Grid grumbles: none! A bit of a geography exam, but I doubt these entries caused serious trouble.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
Another mixed bag of a Saturday puzzle for me. The grid is rather perverse. Combining 14-letter answers with the two 15-letter acrosses is a nice idea, but done a bit hamfistedly, making double unches (start of 7D, end of 17D), and although the 3 of 7 checking letters in these answers were uncommon enough to make these answers pretty clear, the double unches are not impressive. We also get four 5-letter answers with 2 letters checked, though again the checking letters for them are relatively helpful. The clues are generally good – I seem to be grumbling less than usual below – though the last one was disappointing.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ***
Given a 4-star difficulty rating mainly bcause it took me a long time to be sure of 9A, so the total time was about double my average for this puzzle. One of those rather odd grids that’s perfectly OK apart from the over-unched 5-letter words, but includes a whopping 16 7-letter answers, and only three other word-lengths. It’s easy to see changes that would both increase the variety of answer lengths and fix the under-unching.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment **
Started this off very fast but slowed down in the bottom half. A saying to ponder from one of the Times for the Times bloggers: “Some of the words in a clue are there for their meaning, and some for their content”. As a solver, it’s well worth asking “why is this particular word used”, and any passing setters will already have realised that concealing the words included for their content can be quite difficult.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
The best thing about this puzzle for me was the set of answers – these make a pangram (all letters of the alphabet appear at least once). Some tricky letters appear several times – there are 3 Zs and 4 Vs for example. The bad things for me were a couple of the selections for answers, and some clues that were either not very cryptic or could lead to more than one answer. Some will be delighted to see no obscure place names in this puzzle.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
A mixed bag this one. The grid has a distinctive Telegraph style to it, with the longish answers at 12, 13, 18, 21 placed in the middle of the grid rather than at one side, and quite a few double unches. But it mostly comes up smelling of roses, with fair checking all round and very generous 80% checking for the 10-letter answers. The only niggle is that we get 12 four-letter words.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
I found this a bit easier than last week’s, but based on recent goes at some old DT puzzles, there may be even easier ones out there (or I’m gaining from experience), so not worthy of one-star difficulty. The grid is mostly very sound, but spoiled a bit by some under-checking at the edges. On the placenames that the Saturday setter seems fond of, I don’t mind having them as answers, but would prefer not to have quite such difficult geographical wordplay as used today. I have a vague notion that I’ve seen a more approachable {town+town = town} clue before, but I can’t think of the places – maybe Sometown+Bury or Sometown+Chester?
Continue reading “DT Cryptic No 25900 – Review”
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
This puzzle was memorable for the number of cryptic definitions. I like some of them and had reservations about others. The grid is good this week – six different word-lengths, no isolated corners, and 50%+ checking throughout. Other grid designers might have put the 11-letter words on the same row as a 3-letter word, but as Telegraph puzzles seem to have more three-letter words than some others, a puzzle with none of them is fine!
This was probably the easiest of the Saturday puzzles I’ve covered so far – there was no “nasty corner” to delay a solution when everything else was finished.