Category: Mephisto

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!”

Welcome barred-grid fans! A change is as good as a holiday, so I am always happy when there is something a little different about the grid. Paul McKenna has given us an 11×13 grid anchored … Read more “Mephisto 3213 – Paul McKenna”

This one was not terribly difficult, and I made good progress by starting at the bottom and working my way up.   Most of the cryptics were quite simple, with only two elements, and the answers … Read more “Mephisto 3212 – Don’t sit on my Jimmy Shands!”

Greetings barred-grid fans! Another wordplay tour de force from Don Manley, no question marks on my grid but a lot of notes in the margins. In Mephisto puzzles, definitions (the most direct of which is … Read more “Mephisto 3211 – Don Manley”

This Mephisto was a little more difficult, pushing my solve into the next morning.    Paul can sometimes be a little difficult, but if you take the cryptics and think about them you can usually make … Read more “Mephisto 3210 – Would you buy a used car from this man?”