Friday, February 22, 2008

Catching up: Listener 3963

The first puzzle of the year, and from having a stab at the Listener for a few years, I'm keyed in to it having some sort of New Year's theme. It took me a while to find, pretty quickly I figured out that across clues produced answers that were two letters too long for the grid, and down answers were the correct length. Entering as many clues as I could get after a few days and I saw that the across clues had "I" and "L" in common, and clashes occurred near these. For a while I thought it was something to do with getting rid of Roman Numerals, and when I saw that "one" could be formed from the ommitted letters in across clues, that maybe I had to get rid of the word "one" in several languages.

Penny dropped after finding the two "f"s in the down clues, giving me "fitfty-one" fitting with the L's and I's. Pretty smooth sailing after that, and the year is off to an awesome start!

Tally: George 1, Listener 0

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