Category: Monthly Club Special

Hello and welcome to my first Monthly Club Special blog. The MCS is a crossword that is like a Championship course in comparison to the local 9-hole Quick Cryptic I mostly blog. I do love tussling with these, though. They take me a long time but I have a lot of fun unveiling the delightfully wacky words, like 1A and 26A in this puzzle and unravelling the masterful wordplay, like 10A here. I hope you all enjoyed this too. Thank-you clever setter!

I thought this was really very tricky and I am sorry that I left it until the very end of the month to try to tackle! A number of the clues took a LOT of … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,264: My First Wish Is For Infinite More Crosswords”

After a too-swiftly-dispatched Friday 15×15, it was great to have this beast to entertainingly fill up the rest of the half-hour. I was repeatedly delighted by the audacity and elan, especially the numerous times the … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,263: Not To Be Confused With Tiny Paul Rudd”

Great puzzle, above-averagely clever things to enjoy in almost every single clue, and some valuable new additions to anyone’s vocabulary. I think my COM might be 4dn, where “unfencing” the yard is a very neat … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,262: The Compleat Solver”

Some gobsmackingly good clues in here – I would point you towards 8ac, 11ac, 18ac and 22ac as examples that just feel “next level”. The MCS is the laboratory in which the innovations of the … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,261: Atokic Bomb”

The usual cavalcade of extreme ingenuity, with not a duffer among these clues. COD has got to be the truly exceptional 20ac, managing to seamlessly mesh Australian avifauna with the old vicarage in Grantchester. But … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,260: Surprisingly Chaste Lord Archer Vegetating”

It seems this got lost in the shuffle of the site move, but very unjustly, since it contains many many moments of pure cryptic artistry. Nothing pushes the envelope further (and better!) than these MCS … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,259: Anais, Zaha and Ella Walk Into A Bar…”

Some insane words and super duper cluing in this one. I really loved the next level deviousness of 6ac, all reverse cryptic and &lit stuff in general, and the great surface of 27ac: but my … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,258: Oh, The Cluemanity!”

In shock news, best crossword of the month continues to be best. I loved the surfaces of the brace of Presley clues at 20 and 21dn, and revelled in the audacious cryptic constructions and excellently … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,257: Blue Suede Clues”

A common, plaintive question about doing the MCS is “am I really supposed to be solving this without any aids?” and I would like to go out on a limb and answer that in the … Read more “Monthly Club Special 20,256: 23ac Goo Goo”