Posted by Encota on 1 Apr 2022
I’m having a little trouble uploading the grid for today’s puzzle. So it goes.
I loved the theme and its treatment in Chalicea’s puzzle. How many of us can remember our children (or nephews & nieces, or whoever) joining in with the BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY ‘chorus’?
And with Easter fast approaching, it was good to see so many EGGs in the grid 😉
I went for the one provided by Eggman left-to-right in the bottom row.
Great fun – thanks Chalicea!
Tim / Encota
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Posted by Encota on 4 Feb 2022
With a Title like that, one might expect, in the endgame, to have to drive a route around the grid using N, S, E & W as turning points in a Manhattan-style grid. Maybe it has a New York theme?
Or perhaps, with Direction in the Title, it is about films? After all, the circled letters can be jumbled to make OSCARS. It must be about a film that won loads of Oscars. Hmm.
Hold on a moment! Isn’t that the Twitter-craze, based on the old peg-game Mastermind, hiding in the grid? Nice touch using the word TERM to show where it finishes.
You know the one, Bickle I think it is named, where right letters in the right place get coloured Green and right letters in the wrong place get coloured Yellow. Or was it Black & White, I forget. So that means we might have a Black in one and a Yellow in another. Aren’t they the colour of taxis in different major cities? I’m confused 😉
Cheers,
Tim / Encota
PS More seriously, what a great puzzle! Many thanks to Artix
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Posted by Encota on 24 Dec 2021
An interesting chess-based puzzle that features perhaps the most famous checkmate there is, known as SCHOLAR’S MATE.
In this puzzle the letters in the appropriate cells representing the pieces are, in order, S-C-H-O-L-A-R, so providing the answer to the hidden question WHOSE MATE IS IT?
I think that’s about it. My thanks to Lath
Cheers,
Tim / Encota
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Posted by Encota on 17 Dec 2021
First of all, my thanks go to Ares for a fun puzzle. I particularly liked the multiple BP references throughout. My initially filled rough grid looked like this:
With the help of Chambers I filled in the grid fairly quickly and fortunately guessed that the endgame’s BP just might be Baden-Powell. And I think I found the right reference with:
‘What you should leave behind:
1. Nothing
2. YOUR THANKS, to God for the good time and to the owner of the land’
The only potential remaining issue to resolve now was the Preamble’s “to be carried out literally in the grid, involving ten cells”. With there being 144 cells in the grid, does this mean only alter 10 of them? Or alter (through deletion) all 144 to leave nothing and then put the ten of YOUR THANKS in columns 4 and 8 back into place?
After wondering if my bp was beginning to rise excessively, I decided to stay calm and go with leaving nothing in the grid but YOUR THANKS.
In summary, a well-created puzzle. My thanks again to Ares.
Cheers & stay safe,
Tim / Encota
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Posted by Encota on 10 Dec 2021
Another beautifully constructed puzzle by Arden – delightful!
I do like it when a clue gives far more information than it appears to at first sight. Here’s one example: 11d’s “Twice a square”. Those familiar with number puzzles will be very used to pencilling in the unit digit of any square as one of 0,1,4,9,6 or 5. However, it was new to me that doubling all these gives the reduced set of possibilities of the unit’s digit being 0, 2 or 8. Combining that with the constraint in this puzzle that only digits 1 to 6 appear – and that final digit can be written in immediately as a 2. Only 79 cells left to be filled!
As a complete aside, seeing a mention of ‘nets’ brought back good memories of working closely with the setter Ploy, under the pseudonym EP. As some readers will know, we’ve created thematic puzzles for the excellent Magpie magazine. In these, so far at least, the grids were nets of some form of 3-D shape that could then be folded, built and then ‘flexed’ in different ways to display various thematic references, our last one being entitled (perhaps unsurprisingly) Paper Folding. In today’s puzzle from Arden the challenge was to find as many nets of a ‘standard die’ as one can. “Left-handed or right-handed?” I can hear some of you asking!
Unfortunately this week I seem to have forgotten to scan my entry before posting it off to John Green – it’s all been a bit of a rush recently – apologies for that.
At first I tried to work out what all the nets could be. I recalled that there were about ten of them. I found ten, then realised that I had missed one, the pure zigzag. All eleven appeared in Arden’s grid (with puzzles of this quality we would, of course, expect nothing less!) and the remaining unused 14 cells were arranged symmetrically, which added to the puzzle’s all-round neatness. Loved it – thanks Arden!!
Cheers all,
Tim / Encota
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Listen With Others 