We’ve just had our Christmas crosswords afternoon (16 December 2018) with nut roast, turkey curry, champagne, Black Forest mince pies and baklava, and more champagne!
These are the two crosswords we solved:
Crossword One: Perimetricals are a favourite form of mine (see crossword guide). You have to get the answers, or some of them, before you can put them in the grid. The trick is to solve the ones which must interlock. In this case that would be the four ten‐letter answers, and the two beginning with the same letter of six and four letters respectively, for the bottom right corner. Then the rest of the jigsaw comes a bit easier.
Crossword Two: The other one was a variation of the old party game Farmyard ‐ you need teams of two or more. In each team you need 1+ hunter and 1 gatherer. Each team chooses a farmyard animal. The Hunter(s) go in search of the crossword clues (in wages envelopes) and when they find one, they make their animal noise very loudly to attract their gatherer, who then ‘gathers’ the clue.
Keep going until you have found all the clues, and then teams enter the answers into a communal crossword grid set on the wall, as quickly as they can. One point is scored for each original letter entered in the grid (no point for a letter which crosses a previously answered clue). Obviously I can’t set that up for you on a website, but I think the crossword works in its own right.
I haven’t yet found the right software to create interactive puzzles on the web, but please feel free to download and print them out if you wish. Here are the answers and explanations: Solution ‐ crossword 1 and Solution ‐ crossword 2
Peter Scott-Presland
Please send comments and feedback to peter@homopromos.org. We’d also be delighted to welcome you to the next crossword day in late January/early February 2019.