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Clock Patience

January 22, 2023 By Phixwd Leave a Comment

I thought I’d say a few words about the puzzle I put up at Christmas. It’s not really a setter’s blog, so I’m not putting it there.

I don’t know how the puzzle went down as I’ve received no comments. I set it forty years ago, while I was at Oxford University. At that time, I had experimented with a number of Patience-related crosswords. The basic Klondike variant where you put red on black on red and so on allows for a puzzle where you can clue words in groups (Clubs, Diamonds etc.) that then have only a degree of randomness in their placement – rather better, I feel, than simple alphabetical order. In addition, all the ‘Clubs’ clues having answers beginning with C gives some useful information to the solver.

Clock Patience was the largest of these, and it took a lot of work. This was in the days before I had access to computer-aided graphics as a matter of course, so there was a lot of compass work to draw circles, and the whole thing was handwritten until a typed version was prepared for submission. The first chunk of work, though, was to lay out the cards. I decided to play through several hands of clock patience, noting the order of the cards at each number as I did so. That would give me the structure of the grid. If I was incredibly lucky, one of the several hands might even come out. My expectation was that I would find one that got 80% of the way – enough to keep people playing through.

I shuffled the cards and I played a first hand.  It came out. I arranged the cards according to my notes of the game and played it again. It came out again. Clearly I had to use that one. All these years later, I still agonise that I may simply have made the same error twice and the thing actually sticks four cards in: King, King, King, King. So one reason for putting it up was to see whether a solver could confirm that the patience played out successfully!

What went up today is an Independent daily puzzle from 2008 – I see it’s actually the one from the week immediately after the last daily I put, so you should be safe from significant stylistic changes. And I need to dig deeper into the box next time round.

Sometimes I get notice of a forthcoming puzzle too late to fit into my fortnightly schedule, so I can only retrospectively point you at the Pangakupu puzzle in the Guardian on 18 January. Coming up next Sunday is an Enigmatic Variations puzzle by Kcit, with a Telegraph Toughie a few days later on 2 February. 

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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.

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