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Showing posts from November, 2020

Cryptic #3: XXX

My Third Crossword  And my first themer, three weeks ahead of schedule! I didn't want to go for the usual "these clues have no definition" sort of theme, so I came up with something probably a bit more original. I hope the theme isn't too UK-centric. I reckon this is my most difficult, but also best, puzzle yet. And the grid shapes in the last two left a bit to be desired: I'm proud of this one. Tremendous apologies for some of the clues, and once again, thank you so much to MentalPlayground, Jack Keynes, Danny Vibes and Julian O for testing it out. Seeing how quickly this one took, the next one should be out some time in the Lent term. Have fun! - GAIS, 23/11/20

Cryptic #2: T.W.O.

My Second Crossword  A few rather mean clues, and some puns which I still can't believe I discovered, for both of which I apologise sincerely. No occurences of the letter P in the whole grid, interestingly. I tried to be far too ambitious initially: I had many 3-letter entries, which I tried to combine to get several words, but they would require one letter to be in at least 2 different positions in a word at the same time. I tried to find suitable words using the entire dictionary and some basic Python, but I gave up in the end, so there is only 1 link between the left side and the right side of the grid. Massive thanks to MentalPlayground, Julian O, Agnijo Banerjee and Danny Vibes et al. for all their help in checking and proofreading, as well as Mark from the excellent cruciverbal website Quinapalus.com for giving me the entire English dictionary in plaintext files. I've already written all the themed clues for my next puzzle - that's right, my first themer! -, so e