Scratchings

I just finished today’s Listener puzzle, “Ups and Downs”, at about 6:00 pm after less than two hours’ solving time — just part of my lunch break and the first half hour of my commute home. Very satisfying puzzle, too, even if it turned out to be a relatively easy one. The references in most of the clues to either music, especially Handel works, or the Bible are a sweet touch (and of course a teaser to the nature of the theme), and I found gradually piecing together the theme of the puzzle to be a lot of fun.

Just finished this Friday’s Listener puzzle, “Heart”. Whew. It’s essentially a diagramless crossword, with some additional quirks that have to be discovered. The clues are given in the correct order but with no other information, not even where the across clues end and the down clues begin. We’re told that the grid has 180-degree symmetry, though, which turned out to be very helpful.

At first the thing looked just about impossible, and by Friday night I had solved only 12 of the 42 clues and had put nothing into the grid. I didn’t get much puzzle time in on Saturday, but this morning I figured out where the break was between the acrosses and downs, which helped me make it to maybe 17 or 18 answers. At that point I found four answers that could plausibly interlock, and solving got much easier after that. There are some further instructions to apply to the filled-in grid in order to get the final grid, but they didn’t take me long — the difficulty in this puzzle was all at the beginning.

My favorite iPhone game lately is Trainyard, a puzzle based on getting trains of various colors to their proper stations. Trains come in six colors, and depending how you set up the tracks you can merge, say, a red train and a blue train into one or two purple trains, or split a green train into one blue and one yellow. As you get into the more difficult puzzles, there are usually several specific things you need to make happen, often in a particular order, to get to the right combination of colored trains, and the puzzle is how to make them happen and then get the trains to their stations, when you have what seems like nowhere near enough space for laying down the track you need to accomplish all these things. The key is often finding ingenious ways of having trains use the same track to get to different destinations without interfering with each other.

I’ve solved all the original puzzles and am now about two-thirds through the new batch of forty bonus puzzles — I’m working on them in order and the next one to tackle is “Trinidad”.