Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26606 (Hints)
Big Dave’s Saturday Crossword Club
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As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, I will select a few of the better clues and provide hints for them.
Tag: Daily Telegraph
Toughie 598
Toughie No 598 by Notabilis
All the World’s…
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
Greetings from the Calder Valley. It’s time for the Friday Mental Massage and Notabilis is our tormentor today, which always ensures a good battle. No disappointment today but we do seem to have a thespian theme to the puzzle today. The puzzle does have a Nina (hidden message) running round the perimeter, but I can’t think of a link to the four words produced.
Incidentally, I hope you managed to catch this week’s Desert Island Discs which featured the Guardian’s doyen of the puzzle Araucaria. A wonderful listen and still available via the BBC iPlayer.
DT 26605
Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26605
Hints and tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
Today’s Giovanni is not the most difficult Friday puzzle ever and it has lots and lots of proper names. Let us know how you found it in a comment.
If you want to see an answer highlight the space between the brackets under the clue.
DT 26600
Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26600
A full review by Crypticsue
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
The Saturday Mysteron once again produced one of their crosswords where it seemed to take ages for the pennies to drop and the clues to be solved, but, in the end, everything fell into place in my usual Saturday solving time. Thanks once again to the Mysteron for a nice Prize Puzzle – my favourite clues are marked in blue.
Toughie 597
Toughie No 597 by MynoT
Where’s the pot of gold?
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
With this puzzle MynoT reaches the end of the rainbow. It has as its theme the final two colours of the rainbow with several answers being appropriately coloured. I started very quickly and thought I was on target for a very quick solve but I did then slow down a little. Even so I found it to be at the easier end of the Toughie spectrum.
DT 26604
Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26604
Hints and tips by Big Dave
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
I had no particular favourites in this very ordinary back-page puzzle.
Toughie 596
Toughie No 596 by Excalibur
C’est la Vie
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment **
This was a game of two halves for me, with the bottom half going in fairly quickly but the top half holding out for some time. Excalibur’s puzzles tend to polarise opinions – although this one has some clues which I don’t like much (15a and 23a, for example) others are fine.
Let us know your views on the puzzle and please remember to click on one of the stars below to indicate your enjoyment factor.
DT 26603
Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26603
Hints and tips by Falcon
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
It is a pleasant enough offering today from Jay which I was able to solve reasonably quickly. Given that a few British expressions presented hurdles for me that would be absent for those of you in the UK, I expect you did even better.
Big Dave attached a note to the puzzle saying “With gold mentioned, the downs are almost Goldilocks and the three bears! ” And, with hair being mentioned in the across clues (10a), perhaps the theme is complete.
Toughie 595
Toughie No 595 by Giovanni
The Grumpy Old Man is back again!
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *
My problem with Giovanni’s puzzles is that you never know which Giovanni is going to turn up. I found this one to be a boring slog and I didn’t enjoy it at all.
DT 26602
Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26602
Hints and tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
We were taken to task yesterday, in a comment from StevieG, for referring to some puzzles as fairly straightforward, because this might be discouraging to some solvers who don’t find them straightforward at all. However, if we’re writing a review we have to be able to say how difficult we found the puzzle relative to the average back-pager, and in my opinion this one is, well, fairly straightforward. It does have a few entertaining clues (but too many anagrams for my taste). Do feel free to agree or disagree.
If you want to see an answer just drag your cursor through the space between the brackets under the clue.