I finished this week’s Listener puzzle (“Double Devilry”) during my 45-minute lunch break, with time left over to blog about it. Nice enough puzzle, but not all that much to it. Only twenty clues to solve. At first it looks like the clues won’t give enough information to fill the grid. But by the time I solved eleven or twelve of them, I tumbled to what was going on, and the rest of it fell apart fairly easily.

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”.

At first, this week’s Listener crossword — called “Half-Thyme” — seemed like it was going to be fairly easy. The instructions were fairly straightforward for a change, and actually explain what is going on instead of dropping cryptic hints that you can’t understand until you’ve filled in 85% of the grid. I understood what’s going on by the time I’d solved a half dozen or so clues, and even now that I’m within a half dozen or so clues of finishing, that understanding still seems to be holding up.

Nevertheless, filling in the grid has been a slow battle, though a fair and a satisfying one (at least so far!). Lots of very nice, clever, well-written clues.

(At least one, though, that clues a word by breaking it up into parts, one of which is a closely related word. That sort of thing seems to be acceptable in a lot of British cryptics, though I don’t think it would get by the editor in most American cryptics. It always seems a bit lame to me — to make up an example off the top of my head, somewhat exaggerated in its lameness, but not by that much, such a clue might be “Bride-to-be makes groom-to-be full of energy” as a clue for FIANCEE, made by putting E for energy inside FIANCE.)

I don’t like to say much that’s specific about whatever Listener puzzle I’m working on at the time, in case I spoil the fun for someone who is working on the puzzle and hasn’t made some discovery yet. So I’ll just say that the puzzle grid represents an herb garden in which you must discover the names of a certain number of herbs. I’ve found about two-thirds of them, and I know what a few of the others will be even though I haven’t completely located them yet. There’s also a “thematic phrase” that you’re supposed to be able to reveal; I have a strong idea about how that will happen but don’t have quite enough of the grid solved yet to know what the phrase is.

Moments later: I just did a Google search on a hunch, and now I think I know what the phrase is. That should help me a lot in finishing up the grid!

Still later: Stayed up another half hour or so and finished the puzzle at about 2 am Sunday morning.

Just dropped my entry into the mail for this weekend’s Listener puzzle, “Atom Smasher”. Another fairly simple one: After solving eight or nine clues, I found one of the 13 “clashes” in the grid (places where a pair of across and down words have different letters where they cross), and just looking at the letters I’d filled in already in the grid, my puzzle brains kicked in and I had a hunch about what was going on with the 13 clashes, and that turned out to be right.

I worked on the puzzle on my commute home, and a little more after dinner, and by bedtime I had solved enough to read the message that told how I was to resolve the clashes in the grid. I didn’t work on it again till Saturday evening, because I spent all afternoon working on the play I’m working on, but once I’d started again it didn’t take me long to finish. Having spotted the sort of pattern in the clashes was a help when I got to the last four or five clues, as it helped me know where the last few clashes could and couldn’t be.

Pleasant puzzle, not great, not bad.

It’s 2 a.m. and I just finished this week’s Listener puzzle. It seems like a much harder puzzle than the last few weeks’ puzzles have been, even accounting for the fact that I was incredibly tired today and napped most of the afternoon.

I’m too tired to try to explain any of it. For the record, though: I didn’t figure out what the mystery group was till I’d filled in the answers to all but one of the clues. I finally cracked it by way of the seven misprints in the clues; I had only found six of them, but that was enough for me to unscramble the seven-letter word. That led me to a location associated with one of the members of the group, at which point I had the head-slapping moment and everything became clear.

Very clever theme. There are six words you have to discover, and they make up the members of the mystery group; I had made guesses about what two of them might be early on, yet didn’t see what the group was, even though it eventually turned out that both guesses were correct and the group was not unknown to me. Tricky! Lots of theme-related answers in the grid that don’t have clues, so there wasn’t much help from crossing letters in parts of the grid. Lots of clues that made me smile, including 1A, 5A, 24A, 31D, 11D, and 27D.

I’m pretty close to finishing this week’s Listener puzzle, called “Refrain”. Each clue, when solved, contributes a letter to a line from a song, followed by its source. I figured out the line after solving only about a quarter of the clues, from having just enough letters to guess what the source was. Googling the source and the one probable word I had of the line gave me the song.

Eight of the crossings “clash”, which is to say the across and down words have different letters and we have to figure out which to put into the grid. I think I know the criterion, but if I’m right about that, one of the clashes I’ve found could be resolved either way and I’ll have to figure it out from the fact given that the eight unused letters spell out a word related to the song.

I got off to a shaky start because the first five crossings I found included three of the eight clashes, which seemed like long odds and I thought something must be wrong. But I looked over my few answers up to that point and they looked right, so I pushed ahead and everything has worked out so far. Now, as I write this, I have two unsolved clues and two undiscovered clashes.

I just finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “Vive le Différence” by Kevin. Well, I have the grid filled in, which is all I need to enter the competition. But I don’t really understand it. According to the instructions, “the resulting grid symbolically marks a milestone on a journey begun on March 23, 1991, as calculated from a slightly earlier departure”. I see what is formed by the replaced letters, but I don’t know what the journey is or what the milestone is or what is meant by the slightly earlier departure.

Later: Ah, just figured out what the milestone is and all the rest. Nice.

Whew. I just now finished this week’s Listener puzzle, called “Digimix” by Oyler. A number puzzle this week, and a very tough one. In order to fill the grid, you have to deduce eleven pairs of numbers, one of four digits and one of five, which have the properties that (a) they contain between them the nine digits from 1 to 9, once each, and (b) the sum of their squares is a nine-digit number that likewise contains the nine digits from 1 to 9, once each. This nine-digit number is broken into three three-digit numbers, so that each set contains five numbers (a four-digit, a five-digit, and three three-digit). The sets then contain 55 numbers in all, and most of these are clued in terms of grid entries. For example, one of the three-digit numbers is clued as b + e + p, and b, e, and p are entries in the grid (which is like a crossword grid but lettered rather than numbered).

It took me about five minutes on Friday afternoon to break into the grid, as the constructor kindly put an obvious clue in the first set of numbers — one of the three-digit numbers is a multiple of another, so between them they must contain six different digits, none of them zero. Other factors limited the values of the two numbers, and it wasn’t hard to run through the possibilities and find the only one that worked. That quickly gave me six squares filled in the grid.

I am giving next to nothing away by saying that much. It took only five minutes to get those, and then by Friday evening, despite a few pages filled with scribbled calculations that didn’t lead very far (for example, I had deduced that the last digit of a certain grid entry could only be 2, 5, or 8, but I could see any way to use this information to get any further), I still had only those six squares filled. By Saturday afternoon, I had a grand total of eleven. (The grid is nine squares by seven squares, or sixty-three in all.) But on Sunday I spotted a couple of deductions I could make that I had overlooked before, and those put useful limits on what some of the numbers in the sets could be.

I ended up getting out the laptop and doing some of the calculations in a spreadsheet program, and that made things much easier; this would be a much more tedious puzzle to solve with just a calculator. Several times I found that I’d narrowed the possible combinations of a few numbers down to six, or twenty-four, or in one case sixty possibilities, and what I needed to do was run the same series of calculations on all of them and see which ones led to possible answers. Much easier to do this in a spreadsheet, where I could set up the series of calculations just once and then quickly apply it to all the possibilities.

It feels a bit inelegant to me somehow that the puzzle needed this kind of brute-force approach (unless I’m just missing the way to solve it without it); but then, at the same time I can’t actually see a rational reason why a spreadsheet program should seem too much to me while a calculator and a printed table of square numbers seem perfectly acceptable tools to me (which they do); they’re all just timesavers for calculations I’m perfectly capable of making with pen and paper alone but don’t want to because it would be long and dull.

But the puzzle certainly wasn’t all about brute force with a spreadsheet. There were a lot of surprising and tricky deductions I had to make along the way, and it was very satisfying to figure those out.

(For those who find this entry because they’re actually trying to solve the puzzle: Yeah, I found the preamble confusing, too, and I think it’s poorly worded. Try changing the first three words to In each of the eleven horizontal rows of clues below. I was confused by the boldface letters at first, too; they aren’t clues themselves, they’re headings for the vertical columns of clues below them. Capital letters in the clues stand for across entries in the grid and lowercase letters stand for down entries. In the final sentence, I am assuming that missing entries should be missing clues because nothing else seems to make sense; all the entries are missing, obviously, because the grid is blank when you start.)

I found this week’s Listener puzzle particularly difficult. I started Friday afternoon, and although it was competing for my attention with a few other things, I must have given it a good hour or more before going to bed that night, by which time I had solved exactly one clue. By lunch the next day I had solved two more.

Still, I chipped away at it, and by the end of the day Sunday I had the upper left corner of the grid filled in. Each answer contributes one letter to a Shakespearean quotation, and I had enough letters at this point to make a good guess at two consecutive words of the quote, at which point I was able to find it easily (doesn’t everyone have a Shakespeare concordance on their cell phone?). The quote then gave me a general idea as to what was going on with some of the clues that hadn’t been making sense.

This morning I finished the puzzle on the way to work, except that I haven’t rearranged 15 letters to form a second quotation. But you don’t need that to finish the grid, you only need to find and highlight in the grid the name of the second playwright, and I’ve done that. So I’m really to submit my entry whether or not I figure out the phrase.