Category: Daily Cryptic

I found this crossword to be of moderate difficulty, but for me it had too many “I suppose it works” clues to be as satisfying as our usual Wednesday offerings. It took me about 40 minutes and a bit longer to parse them all …

My first blog in the new forum! I’m very pleased to see the back of all those advertisements in Russian. And so to business as usual….

No fewer than four double definitions (DDs) here and plenty of deletion too, certainly contributory factors to making this a rather easy offering.

Another masterpiece of misdirection from our Wednesday setter, it took me nearly 45 minutes in two spells with a break, to do this and parse it all. Four fishy clues for you, one of which conjured up nice memories of hoping to be crushed in a cupboard next to a girl I had a crush on.

Solving time: 41 minutes. There were some tricky clues here but I worked my way through it steadily and was reasonably satisfied with my solving time.

This was a not-so-mild puzzle for a Monday, that took a little doing.   I got off on the wrong foot almost immediately, looking at the first clue and thinking: is the magazine Life, or Look? 

This was good! I finished it in ~8 minutes, closing out a fairly nippy week, but I felt like I needed to stay on my toes throughout this worthy challenge. My favourite clue was 5dn, … Read more “Times 28,253: Dougal Where’s Your Troosers”

Time taken: 9:55, but with one error. Own silly fault – I had an entry that I knew was incorrect because I had to change a crossing letter, but didn’t fix it up right away, … Read more “Times 28252 – check your submissions well!”

I thought this was an excellent, but not difficult, puzzle, with some fine surfaces to the clues, such as 29a 6d, 20d, and 27d. It took me 22 minutes, with a ‘must be that’ for … Read more “Times 28251 – well polished surfaces here.”

My solving time was 40 minutes with a little help on an unfair clue. I had several misgivings about this puzzle as detailed below. As usual definitions are underlined in bold italics, {deletions and substitutions … Read more “Times Cryptic 28250”