Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26741
Hints and tips by pommers
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Hola from the Vega Baja. Phew, I think Jay must have missed the memo about being easy on us solvers this week! I found this to be a bit tricky in places! Perhaps it’s just me! Enjoyable tussle though.
I’ve gone for 3* but my time was getting very close to 4* again. As is often the case with a Jay puzzle I’d recommend starting on the downs. It’s abit light on anagrams so I know some of you will be disappointed.
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Toughie No 687 by Warbler
A piece of 11 across!
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
Today Warbler presents us with a fairly easy Toughie, as has become the custom for the Tuesday slot. There is a tasty theme running through several of the across answers!
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26740
Hints and tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty * – Enjoyment **
Perhaps the setters think that we’ll all be stressed out with preparing for the festivities this week and have decided to go easy on us with some not too strenuous fare. Certainly this one is not very stress-inducing, including as it does quite a lot of fairly simple anagrams. Your comments, as always, are very welcome.
If you need to see an answer just drag your cursor through the space between the brackets under the relevant clue.
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26739
Hints and tips by Libellule
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BD Rating – Difficulty * – Enjoyment ***
A piece of (Christmas) cake! (Thanks to Gazza for that).
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Toughie No 686 by Elkamere
The Bigger Picture!
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****
Greetings from the Calder Valley. After expecting Firefly or Myops today, I was pleasantly surprised to see that today’s Tormentor was Elkamere. I think this is the first outing on a Friday for him and the puzzle is more than worthy of its place in the spot reserved for the hardest puzzle of the week.
This is a slightly unusual puzzle and one that I appreciate may cause a few solvers to give up. There are some lovely elegant clues, but the “gimmick” of the puzzle is clever and perhaps some may say a bit too clever. In this puzzle, there are four clues that have the indications of four and six letters each with grid slots for the four letters. The clues are all “justified” by 14 across. An explanation is shown after the Downs, although you will need to highlight it to see it. I twigged 5 across fairly quickly but couldn’t see how it fitted in to the scheme of things. Only when I completed the grid did it dawn on me how it worked. There was a Guardian setter called Apex who used to use a similar sort of device in some of his puzzles and it is nice to see this sort of working again here.
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Sunday Telegraph Cryptic No 2618
A full review by Crypticsue
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BD Rating – Difficulty **– Enjoyment ***
Of all the people who commented on this puzzle on Sunday, I appear to have been the only one who found it straightforward to solve; everyone else struggled with the left-hand side, although we all seemed to agree that Virgilius provided us with the usual great Sunday entertainment. My favourites are marked in blue. Continue reading “ST 2618”
Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26737
Hints and tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
I thought this was a really enjoyable Giovanni puzzle. Let us know how you got on with it.
If you need to reveal an answer just highlight the space between the brackets under the troubling clue.
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26732
A full review by Crypticsue
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BD Rating – Difficulty */** – Enjoyment ***
I do hope Gnomethang negotiated a good rate of overtime pay as he certainly seems to be putting in some very long hours lately. Luckily this week I was prepared for a last minute call for help and had kept my solved grid and made notes just in case, little thinking that I would need them. Looking at his comments on the day, I think he might have given this a higher difficulty rating were he writing this blog, but I have based my assessment on my solving time. I did enjoy this typical Cephas Saturday puzzle, with lots of his favourite anagram indicators and it has been nice to revisit it. Continue reading “DT 26732”
Toughie No 685 by Micawber
Let’s all play Charades!
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Last Friday Tilsit gifted me a Notabilis and now Bufo has taken a day off and left me a superb Micawber puzzle to review!
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26736
Hints and tips by pommers
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Hola from the Vega Baja where it’s pretty chilly again at this silly time of the morning! No, it’s not Wednesday! Bufo is unavailable today so BD is doing the Toughie and I’m standing in on this one.
I really enjoyed this puzzle but found it a bit of a challenge. I’ve gone for 3* but another couple of minutes and it would have been 4*. It doesn’t feel like a RayT as there are too many 2 word answers but we must be due one soon so you never know.
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