Category: Mephisto

Solving time: 2h Haven’t done one of these for a while – and I had to resort to Chambers fairly quickly. The usual smattering (flood?) of archaisms and Scots and a couple of murky wordplays. … Read more “Mephisto 2435/give me a breek”

Solving time – 33 minutes, without Chambers Mephisto puzzles by Mike Laws can be tricky, but this one was fairly straightforward. One or two points of detail mentioned below where you may be able to … Read more “Mephisto 2434 – Mike Laws”

Solving time: 27 mins without Chambers, but one mistake (20A) At least on the Times club site, this puzzle was spoiled by the truncation of four clues. Here they are in full, as the site … Read more “Mephisto 2433 – Chris Feetenby”

This was the toughest Mephisto that I have had to blog – I’m not sure why.  Sometimes I just seem to struggle for no apparent reason, and this was the case here.  70-80% of the … Read more “Mephisto 2432/Tim Moorey – just glad to get it finished!”

Maphisto 2431 – Mike Laws Solving time: say 75 mins Had a disjointed experience of this. Solved about half to two-thirds on paper when visiting relatives last Sunday – between playing football with one nephew … Read more “Mephisto 2431 – Mike Laws”

Solving time – about 32 minutes, with fairly extensive use of Chambers. One of the rules of crossword grid construction observed almost everywhere is “no duplicated entries”. This puzzle throws the rule in the bin … Read more “Mephisto 2429 / Tim Moorey – Carnifex!”

Solving time: 37:33 None too easy again this week.  No major problems, just a fair deal of devious wordplay to unravel.  An unusual Amount of “misleading” capitalization Too – no less than 6 counts, 3 … Read more “Mephisto 2426/Tim Moorey – A Capital Puzzle”

Solving time: 37:04 I found this a lot tougher than normal for a Chris Feetenby Mephisto.  After 23 minutes I noted that I had only entered 16 answers along with a few parts of wordplay … Read more “Mephisto 2424/Chris Feetenby – An excuse for an old (bad) gag”

Last weekend, my efforts at solving were really poor. I didn’t complete the Times, took ages over the Indie, and let’s not even go there with Inquisitor, which I have to blog later this week. … Read more “Mephisto 2423/Tim Moorey – Solved like an amateur!!”

Solving time: 50 mins without Chambers, followed by one look-up (7D). Maybe I wasn’t in quite the right mood, but this seemed like one of those times when the setter’s odyssey through the further reaches … Read more “Mephisto 2422 – fairly tough”