Category: Mephisto

Greetings, barred-grid fans. The puzzle appeared out of order in the online Times, and the solution will be published online today, so the blog is appearing at around the same time as 3222. Rather fun … Read more “Mephisto 3223 – Don Manley”

Well, here is the famous puzzle that was supposed to have been published online two weeks ago, but 3223 went up in its place.   

Greetings barred-grid fans! I had a few struggles with this one, particularly in the bottom right hand corner, where I think I was looking too hard for a pop culture or sport reference that Tim … Read more “Mephisto 3221 – Tim Moorey”

This Don Manley Mephisto was not terribly difficult, but since I was tired I didn’t finish it all in one sitting, wisely breaking off and going to bed with several undone.   When I came back, I found most of them rather straightforward, with only a couple need a trawl through Chambers.  

Greetings barred-grid fans, and welcome to The New Place! Hope you are enjoying it so far.

Although I finished in one sitting of about two hours, I found this pretty tricky. There are a few places where you have to cross-reference variable spellings among different words – for example, stanyel might be staniel or stannel, so you have to go see whether a meadow can be a ley, a len, or a lei. What fun! And just when you think it’s all obscure archaic words from Chambers, the setter throws in Neil Diamond.

Greetings barred-grid fans! I found this week’s offering a little trickier than Don Manley’s recent Mephisto puzzles, though I was not helped by confidently putting TOOTS in at 16 across, and another typo in an early down that held up the top half for a long time.

Although some of the cryptics are a bit strange, the answers were mostly evident, and the vocabulary was pretty simple for Mephisto.   If you biffed Festschrift, as I did, you should be right on the … Read more “Mephisto 3216 – ….Soldier, Spy”

Greetings, barred-grid fans! My greatest difficulties in this puzzle were in the top left, having a strong conviction that “park” in the clue was going to lead to P. I think near the end I … Read more “Mephisto 3215 – Tim Moorey”

Like most Don Manley puzzles, this was pretty straightforward, and I managed to solve it in one sitting.  Most of the answers are not too obscure, and some of the cryptics are quite easy.   Stahlhelmist … Read more “Mephisto 3214 – Now the AT&T, sorry about that, Mr Crosby!”