Listen With Others

This week, we were faced with a 13×13 carte blanche grid. The preamble started “Clues are given in order across the ranks and down the files …” with the clues listed under the headings Ranks and Files. This must be a hint that the puzzle has something to do with Chess or Draughts. Anyway, no shenanigans with the clues, but entries could start anywhere in the designated rank or file and continue on the next line if necessary. The rest of the preamble could wait until the grid was complete.

1ac (or 1rk, if you prefer) was Pear sauces I’m cooking, specially made (12) (an anagram of ‘Pear sauces Im’), followed by a straightforward Powder one in solicitous concern (4) giving TALC. This fixed the 12-letter word starting in the first square, with TALC starting in the last and continuing onto the second rank. I decided to work my way down from the top left and see how I got on. 1dn (or 1fl) was (8, 4, 6) so that fixed them starting in the first square as well. The last two were MOES and CULLIS, and I thought a quick finish might be on the cards.

1dn CASTAWAY made me concentrate again on 1ac. Perhaps it wasn’t a full anagram, but a pear followed by an anagram of ‘sauces im’. I don’t particularly like pears so had to resort to Bradford’s for some help. Of course, there I found CUISSE-MADAME … it was an anagram of ‘sauces im’ followed by an anagram of ‘made’. This enabled another brief flurry of solving, but after about 1¼ hours I only had about 20 entries placed (including ICES misplaced).

The preamble said that bars “must not be entered”, and that’s exactly how I started off filling the grid. However, at the 1¼ hour mark, I realised that I really thought they would help; after all, the answers didn’t overlap. Another 1¼ hours later, and the grid was finished … finished, that is, with the exception of the last three squares in column 13. There were some tricky clues to be grappled with, as well as some really tricky clues. First, though, my two favourites:

 
And now the trickier ones:

 
And so to the endgame. My initial guess was that we were faced with a game of Battleships. Rank 4 contained GAMES and 9 and 10 both had HIT. The reason that I didn’t suss the whole of Rank 4 was that I’ve always thought it was tic-tac-toe with an E. In fact, I’m sure it is, but a quick check with our primary reference has tick-tack-toe, tick-tack-too and tic-tac-to. So that was the theme and, I assumed, the “mostly incorrect description of the remainder of the final grid”.

But where was the instruction? The symmetrical row to TIC-TAC-TO GAMES read O, ME TOO, Y[our] GO, DOPE … well, ‘dope’ was reversed, but hey! No, I decided that was far too convoluted. But, and here I am being brutally honest, my scrawly writing and the bars that I had stupidly decided to put in my working copy of the grid, enabled me not to spot MULTI and PLY and BYTE and N! Instead, I wondered whether the instruction snaked around the grid a bit.

I decided to fill in all the zeros, ones and twos of the code and see what popped out. Yes … loads of 0s and 1s did, but also three 2s. One of these corresponded with the B of BELTED, but the other two were in the central column. Finally, I saw MULTIPLY BY TEN lurking there. And of course it became obvious what to do with all the zeros and ones … they got changed into noughts and crosses, although I’m not sure that the Romans had a zero. (I soon discovered my error with BELTED and substituted a P for the B.)

Now all that remained was to fill one of the three empty squares. A quick inspection showed that these formed part of a valid game of tic-tac-toe in the lower right 3×3 block, which, with my X in the bottom right corner, gave me a winning line. Well done me, and well done Ozzie for a superb puzzle. What looked as though it was weird and convoluted turned out to be exactly what was required by the preamble. In all it took me two lots of 1¼ hours for the grid and at least another 1¼ hours to find the message and check and recheck all the noughts and crosses in my solution!