Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
This is a good, solid puzzle with some nice surface readings. I always think that if you are amused by the first clue across, which was the case for me here, then you are pre-disposed to like the whole puzzle.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ***
I got 1a and 1d immediately and thought that the whole thing was going to be a doddle – how wrong can you be? Nearly every clue after that needed to be winkled out, and even after getting the solution to some of them (notably 7d) I struggled to work out the wordplay. But it was an enjoyable challenge, with some nice surface readings.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
I’m still struggling with the effects of Saturday’s hard drive crash combined with an Internet connection that is varying today from poor to non-existent. Will be back with this puzzle after a trip to the dentist. Can the day get any worse?
Well, I finally managed to get around to this puzzle, and it looked at first as if it was going to be difficult. However, the setter was very kind with all four long answers being anagrams. One or two curiosities, but overall not a bad puzzle.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Once more we have an excellent Tuesday puzzle with some very entertaining surface readings. The layout of the grid encourages you to solve one corner at a time, and I was proceeding quite well until I reached the South-East corner which held me up for a while.
Can I point out to new readers (and to regular readers who have not yet read Big Dave’s FAQ!) that the curly brackets associated with each clue are not just there for artistic embellishment – the answer is hidden inside them, and if my hints are insufficient to give you the answer you can reveal it by selecting the space inside the brackets.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
One weak one this time round, with a couple of surplus articles, but nothing major to write home about.
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Continue reading “DT 25931”
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***** – Enjoyment *****
Once again Elgar serves up a Toughie that is worthy of the name. Always tough, always enjoyable, each answer has to be carefully extracted. Even after I had completed it, I still had to sort out the wordplay for four of the clues.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****
A tricky crossword today, but with some very good clues.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ***
Given a 4-star difficulty rating mainly bcause it took me a long time to be sure of 9A, so the total time was about double my average for this puzzle. One of those rather odd grids that’s perfectly OK apart from the over-unched 5-letter words, but includes a whopping 16 7-letter answers, and only three other word-lengths. It’s easy to see changes that would both increase the variety of answer lengths and fix the under-unching.
