Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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BD Rating – Difficulty * – Enjoyment ***
Many thanks as usual to Cephas for another straightforward enjoyable Saturday puzzle. After all the varying levels of difficulty in the weekday puzzles (Toughies included), I quite like a gentle Saturday puzzle. It gives me my daily crossword ‘fix’ and still leaves time for all the other things that have to be crammed into an all-too-short weekend.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
Bufo is taking a sabbatical this week, so Digby has done my back-page review and I have taken over the responsibility for the Toughie review.
It doesn’t take long to realise that there is a theme in today’s puzzle. Fortunately 23 across, the key to the theme, is a straightforward anagram and that makes the whole puzzle relatively easy.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
A reshuffle of the Blogging Brigade means that you get me today, tackling what BD warned me as being a bit tricky. The bark wasn’t perhaps quite as bad as the bite, and I found it to be a fair and challenging puzzle, with a couple of clues that lifted it just above 3* difficulty. It wouldn’t have been totally out of place on the Toughie page, but regular solvers should not be put off by that.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
Elgar doesn’t often stray from Fridays into midweek territory so this excellent puzzle is exceedingly welcome. It’s not as fearsome as some of his but brilliantly entertaining and full of d’oh moments. It also (and I don’t know how he manages to construct a puzzle like it) has a pattern round the outside, which, once you’ve twigged what’s going on, does make it a bit easier.
Please leave a comment telling us how you got on and click on one of the stars below to record your enjoyment factor.
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BD Rating – Difficulty */** – Enjoyment ***
Hola from the Vega Baja. This was the usual entertaining stuff from Jay but one of my quickest solves ever, I don’t think many people are going to need the hints today! It would have been a straight 1* had it not been for two clues where I made problems for myself. There are no obscure words and five anagrams to give you a start, which I know many of you like. I also expect that some will disagree with my rating!
Continue reading “DT 26813”
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
I thought this puzzle lacked the sparkle of some of Petitjean’s earlier Toughies.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **/*** – Enjoyment ***
This puzzle is a bit like Baby Bear’s bed, not too hard but not excessively soft. There are a couple of clues (21d for example) where the answer is fairly obvious but you have to think about the wordplay. Let us know how you got on.
If you found it more like Daddy Bear’s bed then you can reveal the answers by dragging your cursor through the spaces between the brackets under the clues.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
An entertaining crossword (as usual) from Rufus this morning. Perhaps a little trickier than normal with some of the clues 7d,8d,13d requiring a bit more lateral thinking.
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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 ***
The usual excellent start to Sunday with 14a being the clue of the day for its lovely surface reading. Thanks once again to Virgilius for brightening up a very rainy, grumpy, Sunday morning.