Toughie No 1270 by Excalibur
One for the bird’s … or do I mean birds?!
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
A typical Excalibur puzzle to fill the Tuesday ‘Toughie’ slot.
Category: Excalibur
Excalibur is Nuala Considine. She was, until early 2009, the setter for the Sunday Telegraph.
Toughie 1250
Toughie No 1250 by Excalibur
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BD Rating - Difficulty *** - Enjoyment ***
Even for those of us who are not too fussed about anagram quotas, thirteen is surely on the high side. Still, they make for some nice surface readings in this Excalibur puzzle. Slightly trickier than recent Tuesday offerings, I thought. I got dreadfully stuck on 4d, having pencilled in DOS as the last three letters. Did anyone do the same?
In case you haven't seen it, the video at 13a is not to be missed.
Toughie 1234
Toughie No 1234 by Excalibur
A Shirley Temple or something a little stronger??
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BD Rating – Difficulty **/*** – Enjoyment **
A Tuesday level Toughie from Excalibur with several opportunities to type ‘from the clue’ as I prepared the blog. The difficulty rating is 2.5 because parsing some of the clues did take slightly longer than usual
Toughie 1218
Toughie No 1218 by Excalibur
Hints and Tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
I fairly raced through three-quarters of this one, then had to slow up a bit in the final (SW) quadrant. Even so this puzzle scarcely lives up to its billing. The phrase ‘Tuesday Toughie’ is becoming a sort of oxymoron – I wonder whether it’s a deliberate policy to make them pretty easy at the start of the week in order to attract more new solvers or whether the editor can’t get enough of the genuine article.
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Toughie 1190
Toughie No 1190 by Excalibur
Hints and Tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
This is a typically quirky puzzle from Excalibur. We have lots of very short anagrams including several with only three letters and one (and I don’t remember ever having seen this before) with only two letters.
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Toughie 1170
Toughie No 1170 by Excalibur
Hints and tips by crypticsue
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BD Rating – Difficulty */** – Enjoyment **
A straightforward Toughie to start the week, although I think our setter was in fighting mood when she worked on some of the clues!
Toughie 1150
Toughie No 1150 by Excalibur
The Week Starts Here!
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
Greetings from the Calder Valley. I managed to stage an escape from the clutches of Matron yesterday and came home to the milk I had left out when the ambulance arrived to ferry me off, which appears to have turned into that little-known Calderdale Cheese, and bread that Alexander Fleming would be interested in studying. However I am feeling much better, and thanks to everyone for their nice wishes off and online.
We start the Toughie week with the monthly offering from Excalibur, which very much fits into the Tuesday Toughie gentle pigeon-hole. Nothing too taxing although there were a couple of unfamiliar definitions, and a couple of the clues, you wrote the answer in and had to work out why afterwards, which to me isn’t the point of a cryptic.
Toughie 1130
Toughie No 1130 by Excalibur
Tipsy? Not Us!
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
Greetings from the Locarno Ballroom in Carlisle. Ginger and I are doing the Not Totally Strictly Come Dancing Tour with the lookalikes Ben Goodman, Darcey Mussels, Craig Kenwood Mixer and Bruno Ravioli. Non-stop dancing and very little champagne makes us very grumpy. So we decided to sit down and tackle today’s Toughie by Excalibur. Probably just what we needed, a typical gentle Tuesday workout rather than the Friday beasts we are used to. Nothing terribly demanding but it passed a pleasant coffee break.
Toughie 1112
Toughie No 1112 by Excalibur
A Grumpy New Year to One and All
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *
I lost interest in this puzzle half-way through and would have given up on it had I not had a blog to write. It took me far to long to do and I didn’t enjoy it at all. I must be turning into a grumpy old man.
Toughie 1088
Toughie No 1088 by Excalibur
The Eden Project, Phase I
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ***
Bufo is having a day off so I’ve been called from the subs’ bench to blog this Excalibur Toughie. I thought it was a real mixture with some good clues (the ones I liked best being 19a, 6d and 11d), some that I didn’t like (14a and 26d) and some surface readings that didn’t make much sense (e.g. 5a and 7d). It took me longer than average to solve so I’ve given it 4* for difficulty.
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