Times Listener No 4359 The Tall'n

[Ruthrobin]

Lovely, thank you, The Tall'n. There was a fine series of penny drop moments leading to a most satisfactory conclusion. Many thanks.

[AHearer]

Agreed - neatly clued, skilful construction with the rearrangements working nicely. I shall refrain from comments on the cipher. Many thanks, The Tall'n.

[jim360]

A theme I'm quite familiar with so the pdms mostly came fairly early. I would have preferred a slightly more challenging cipher, perhaps, although I suppose it's fair enough to go for something that is fairly easy to break even without much practice. And to be sure the resulting misprinted entries allowed for some intriguing clues, so I still found it a pleasant puzzle.

Last before I'm off on holiday, see you all in September.

[jockie]

Yes, nice one The Tall'n (may I call you Theta?). I've been a non-solver for some weeks and it's nice to get back to the weekly exercise again.

[olichant]

Really enjoyable solve.

[easylistener]

Super. Feel chuffed to bits to be a Friday nighter again. Didn't even need to email the usual helpers available on here to get hints! Thanks The Tall'n.

[starwalker]

Lovely puzzle, nicely put together. Fun and fair clues with lots of thematic material. Thanks The Tall'n.

[upsetter]

Amazing construction. Very wide range of clue difficulty. We needed the easy clues to get our foot in the door. Always good to have a crossword which takes you back and forth between initial and final grid and helps with the tricky clues.
Perhaps a bit too much admin for our liking, in all a good challenge. Thanks Tall'n

[sunny-dave]

Nice challenge - tricky clues and a very clever bit of construction to make the final grid all real words.

Thanks Tall'n.

[aldanna]

Nice puzzle, good mixture of easy and difficult clues, and one clue which gave me a big hint to the theme. Unlike Jim (enjoy your holiday) I was quite happy with a non-challenging cipher. Even with that I twisted myself in a few knots coding and decoding, but it's not really my sort of thing. For me it felt a bit circular (Himself does not agree on this but he only helped with the last couple of stages). Very enjoyable, thank you.

[IainGrace]

I see from today's paper that JEG has diversified slightly by winning The Independent General Knowledge Jumbo crossword.

[TheBear69]

Sorry, but the cipher and how difficult it is seems totally irrelevant. Maybe I missed something, but to 'decipher' the messages all one has to do is to restore the crossing entries to their correct spellings. Sorry, The Tall'n, but that seemed to detract from an otherwise strong Listener.

[icynorth]

I have to agree with TheBear69. The coding was simple, and only really served to make the wordplay more difficult. Something more challenging would have been more in keeping with the theme.

Notwithstanding that, the puzzle was well executed and enjoyable to complete - thanks, The Tall'n!

[jim360]

That's technically true although one can argue that the cipher does matter a bit as once it's solved then that can allow you to gain information about the wordplay letters given in crossing clues, which was at times fairly useful to understand a couple of the more tricky clues in this lot. In that sense perhaps it's better that it was so easy to crack as otherwise it would indeed have provided literally nothing.

[upsetter]

In the Jim 360 camp on the coding issue. Originally of the same view as that expressed by the Bear, but we found that the structure imposed by the preamble helped sort out some of the more difficult clues.

[freiheid]

For me, the coding seemed somewhat pointless as it was possible to enter unadjusted answers and come up with the unclued ones directly. A worthier and more coherent endgame might have asked us to highlight an enciphered section of the grid that had used the same code.

[Cagey]

I enjoyed this one. A theme and subject I am very familiar with, but no harm in that. Last week I learned a number of thematic examples I had never heard of, this week I am not sure I learned anything new from the actual crossword, but did find a whole barrage of new stuff on the net loosely associated with it.
Thank you Tall'n

[Philoctetes]

Neat and straightforward. But dare I mention we haven't had a Playfair for ages? (Evil chuckle!)

[perseverer]

Numbers due this week. Just as popular with many as Playfair!

[olichant]

Shudder. I'm going to have to try a numerical without a computer. I know it's supposed to be possible (indeed, the whole point is it's supposed to be possible) but I'm not looking forward to it.

[aldanna]

No, no, no. Not numbers again already!