Listen With Others

Only a brief post this week as I have had to reconstruct this one from other notes 😦

I think this is the first of Aragon’s Listener puzzles I have ever attempted – and (for me, at least) it was hard!  Excellent!!  The endgame took much longer than the clue-solving.

After solving all the clues and spotting that DARK BROWN was one option for the clashing cell-based knight’s moves from bottom to top, I was pretty confident that I was looking to modify seven letters using AINOPTT.  The DOORSTEP was of course easy to find as the Workarea, but the perpetrator took me much longer [I even diverted for a while looking up the American footballer M.SHAWNE who, as he was nicknamed “Lights Out” (for knocking other players unconscious) might have been the cause of the doorstep mishap].  What would Merriman Shawne be doing on the doorstep, though?

Eventually I found POSTMAN, which made a lot more sense.  Deciding that the letter ‘I’ and ‘DOT’ clash could be combined into a pling(!) to ~resolve the 8^th clash and I was sorted.  And this year I then decided to double-check that my highlighting was correct (as I have been guilty of a crayoning error in some recent puzzles) – and it seems to be!

Thanks to Aragon for a really tough puzzle!

Tim / Encota

P.S. And I get a week off from writing a Solver’s Blog next week 🙂