Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
May I take this opportunity to wish all of the setters, the bloggers and the solvers a happy New Year! A quite enjoyable crossword today, but 11 anagrams?
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Happy New Year.
As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, I will select a few of the more difficult clues and provide hints for them.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
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Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
Boaz returns with an excellent and cheeky little number. Favourite clues are shown below highlighted in blue.
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Welcome to the latest in our series of weekly puzzles.
If you have solved any of the previous puzzles by Boaz then you will know what to expect! If not then you are in for a treat.
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Happy New Year everyone.
As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, an assortment of clues, including some of the more difficult ones, have been selected and hints provided for them.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment *****
Today we have a very special guest blogger. Jon88’s impeccable credentials include membership of the National Puzzlers’ League, crosswords published in the New York Times, Washington Post and Games magazine, regular solving of Times, Telegraph, Spectator and Private Eye puzzles. And I nearly forgot – he has won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament no less than seven times. Quite how he also finds time to work in theatre and cabaret is a mystery! He was the assistant musical director for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey for five years. BD
Tilsit is off this week in a land without Internet, newspapers or television (Narnia?), but before he left, he flung the keys across the pond and appointed me the designated driver. Micawber has given us a memorial puzzle of sorts; explanation down below.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
For the third time this week, Gazza has kindly vacated the hot seat to allow one of his fellow bloggers who doesn’t normally get the chance to do an on-the-day review to have a go.  If he had his unaccustomed but well-deserved lie in, he will have missed a superb sunrise which kept distracting me from the job in hand, the review of this very enjoyable Giovanni puzzle.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
The first thing I did with this Mynot puzzle was to determine which letter he has reached in his journey through the alphabet. Once that was established it was a fairly easy solve which I might well have given ** for difficulty had I not stalled on the last couple of clues.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **– Enjoyment ***
Morning All!. We had a very nice festive puzzle from Virgilius which was one of the first to get us into the Christmas mood. I don’t think that there was anything too tricky on the day but would be interested in any elucidation on 1a, and if there is any more in the clue than myself and BD can see.
