Phi Crosswords

phionline.net.nz

  • About me
  • Types of cryptic crossword
    • Solving crosswords
    • Outlets
  • APEX Crosswords
  • My other puzzles
    • BBC Music Magazine crosswords
    • Beelzebub Crosswords
    • Church Times puzzles
    • Enigmatic Variations
    • The European crossword
    • Independent Inquisitor
    • Independent: newspaper
    • Jumbos
    • Magpie
    • Other puzzles
  • Setter’s blogs
  • Book Reviews
  • Cats

Wattwhip

I’d had ricochet words on my list of ideas for some time, but had never quite worked out what to do with them.  Something to do with rebounding off the sides of the grid, clearly.  But ricochet words, because of the reduplication, are quite long and rapidly become unwieldy.  And if you only use the single component, or, more precisely, a   single example of the shared element, well, it’s a bit short.

Or is it? Cue some experimentation where the first problem encountered was that the ricochet paths overlapped precisely as they came round a second time.  It was an embarrassingly long time before it occurred to me to have a non-square grid and, moreover, one where one dimension was odd and the other even.  Then the rebounds precess round the grid on each circuit. No overlapping.

The next question was which reduplicative compounds to use.  Even in the smaller grid the general (6-6) sort of length was not enough to allow each of four to rebound from a different side.  That pretty much obligated the use of HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDY, which just pushed things on a bit.  I didn’t fancy clueing HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDY, but the entered IGGLEDY was friendlier.  There was the question of what to do with the discarded letters – not a terribly inspiring set, so how about an obscure title?

And finally, it felt a nice touch to have solvers looking for three 12-letter answers and one 16-letter answer in a grid they’d already filled!

Share
Tweet
Pin

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Phi RSS feed

  • RSS - Posts

About me

This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

Blogroll

  • Alberich Crosswords
  • Alchemi's puzzles
  • Anax Crosswords
  • Azed slip
  • Big Dave's Crossword Blog
  • Boatman Cryptics
  • Crossword centenary
  • Crossword Centre
  • Crossword Club
  • Crossword Unclued
  • CrosswordMan: Crossword construction software
  • Crosswords by Hasslethymi
  • Fifteensquared
  • George vs The Listener crossword
  • Guardian Crosswords
  • Hoskins Crossword
  • Hubble Crosswords
  • idothei
  • Independent Crosswords
  • Listen with Others
  • Listener Crossword
  • Magpie Crossword Magazine
  • One Across
  • Peter's Cryptic Crossword Corner
  • Telegraph Crosswords
  • The Stickler Weekly
  • Times Crossword Club
  • Times for the Times
  • Undisclosed Enumerations
  • Unscramblerer

Comments

  • Tim Myall on Listener Awards weekend
  • KMB on An unexpected addition
  • Phixwd on Updating the blogroll
  • KMB on Updating the blogroll
  • Erin on On not mowing the lawn

Copyright © 2021 · Beautiful Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in