L4602: Ahead of the Game by Apt
Posted by Encota on 1 May 2020
The Listener can sometimes be a world of illusion – you think you’ve discovered something – only to find out it was, or might be, something different entirely.
In this week’s puzzle this took the form of the famous illusion of a head of a duck … that could be a head of a rabbit. Or was it the other way around? Definitely a head of (the) game, anyway.
More info on its history can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit–duck_illusion
The neatest feature of this puzzle was that, in 12 cells there was a clash. If you read one set of 12 in the correct order it spelt out A QUICK PLUNGE, which pretty much means Duck. The other set of 12 was TALK AT LENGTH, which is Rabbit, as any Cockney will tell you.
The clues were fairly gentle, so this one all slotted in nicely. “Should the path be closed or not?” I suspect I wasn’t the only one asking myself. “Leaving it open can’t be wrong“, I thought, so that’s how I left it.
Cheers,
Tim / Encota
Listen With Others 
shirleycurran said
I just looked at the notes on Listenercrossword.com and was relieved to see that there was no need to join up the ends of the rabbit’s head but solvers were not markedwrong for doing so.