Author: Zabadak

Time: 14:58 This didn’t feel much like a Tricky Thursday with most of my answers suggesting themselves readily from some kind and economical cluing, never more than two lines of print. There’s really only one … Read more “29506 True, I talk of dreams”

Time: 23:56 Not especially difficult, though younger viewers might be challenged by the featured entertainers and some rather odd vocabulary. Our setter seems to be particularly fond of things going backwards – I’ve counted 8 … Read more “29494 Bottles on the doorstep.”

Time: 19:09. Most of this was pretty standard fair, a mix of well signalled anagrams and a lot of first, last, containing and contents letters, plus a couple of soundalikes. The placenames aren’t too outrageous … Read more “29482 Sounds of the stars”

Time: 27:09 What a fantastic set of clues! If you’ve whizzed through biffing and blindly guessing, please go back through and appreciate the fine craftsmanship of ultra smooth surfaces and devious interplay of nouns and … Read more “29470 A smooth operator”

I can’t really give a time for this, as I made the mistake of doing it on the newspaper site rather than the club, on a notebook computer, wrestling with manoeuvring around the grid and … Read more “29458 The hare and the tortilla.”

Time: 26:31, a little more than the additional minute I’ve scored over each of the first three this week. In several entries, working out how the wordplay worked was a stiffer challenge than sticking in … Read more “29446, feeling a bit under par.”

Time: 12:36, by some distance my quickest of the week though it may be the clues just fell nicely for me. The artsy bits should be reasonably well known to regular solvers, though you may … Read more “29434 Keeping it clean”

Time: 35:31. I don’t think I know how to explain that time, which makes the puzzle look harder than I think it was, but let’s put it down to the excitement of Christmas, an incipient … Read more “29422 A Yule Blog”

Time: 17:20. It seems to me that the puzzles are getting easier this week, so perhaps we can expect some record-breaking tomorrow. I still took my time over this, wanting to be sure I understood … Read more “29410 Intermediate”

Time: 22:22 I’ve heard tell that our editor and chums want to include more yoof friendly answers in the grids, though the two examples in this one may be well be into their adulthood by … Read more “Times Cryptic 29398 Rollin’ down the river.”