Category: Daily Cryptic

One of those crosswords that are far harder to explain than to solve.

Too good and complicated for me.

  What fun! A fine set of clues with some very slippery definitions and a broad range of languages, not just the normal French and occasional German. I can’t say I whizzed through: the whole … Read more “29098 Polyglot”

I really enjoyed this Wednesday puzzle; not too difficult but with a collection of good anagrams, mixed cultural references and deceptive and amusing definitions.

A technical DNF as I used aids for my LOI.

This did not feel like an easy Monday at first, as I struggled to get started in the grid.   After five minutes, I only had a few answers here and there.    But once I had a sufficient quorum of crossing letters, I started to speed up dramatically. 

43:39. Well, that’s how I felt solving this puzzle anyway. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of absolutely delightful clues here (meaning surface reading, wordplay, word choice, etc), but I felt that a fair amount of the difficulty for me stemmed from using very uncommon synonyms or abbreviations. But let me parse the clues and I’ll get back to you.

Time taken: 7:32

A pleasant workout with a couple of unusual words but nothing exceptional.

An interesting and at times inventive puzzle.