Listener 4049: The Domino Effect by Googly

[turnerjmw]

The dreaded numbers. Googly was last seen in November 2006 with Solve Two, Get One Free.

I enjoyed this. Not too much heavy duty calculator work, and it all fell smoothly into place. Cheers, Googly

[Spaghetti]

I've had a good year so far with the letter-based puzzles, but I take one look at the clues for these numerical ones and my mind goes completely blank. I wouldn't know where to start!

[Mysterons]

Best place to start is with 33A - 29A = 23D, along with 30D/34A, 2D and 6A.

[Spaghetti]

Thanks, Mysterons. I'll have a go, but I don't hold out much hope.

[Mysterons]

Once you've made a start Spaghetti it's pretty straightforward - the trick is to identify groups of clues which can be solved together, as above.

[emcee]

Not a bad puzzle but not one of the best of the genre. The hardest part was starting it off.

[Speravi]

The "best" place to start is a subjective matter, of course. I found it fruitful to begin by considering 2d and the various implications of the different, somewhat limited, possibilities.

[Cruncher]

This one is not yielding its inner secrets so far. I have arrived at two parallel and mostly discrete values for a bunch of letters which interestingly spell CRAP DO and think I will now run two separate grids and see if one is more promising than the other

[AHearer]

Not too bad for a numbers puzzle. I held myself up for a while with a totally stupid bit of number-blindness, and gave myself a leg up with a guess at what one of the missing clues might be, but it all came out in the end. I don't enjoy the numbers as much as the words, but I admire the compilers in constructing these things to ensure a unique solution.

[Philoctetes]

I too am wallowing in the CRAP DO area. Three times I have gone back to the start, and each time I come up with an impossible answer where a down clue should end in a digit that the corresponding across clue cannot begin with.
Back to it this evening

[Scorpius]

I found this a rather dull slog and it was some time before I was confident of anything definite to put in the grid, though once I made some progress in a particular area it progressed at an even, if tedious, pace.
Another one of those puzzles where one has to keep going over the same ground, narrowing down the possibilities, though none of the maths was complicated

[Cruncher]

All but done though struggling to nail one of the words. Suspect I need to check my dominoes a little more carefully.
I found this pretty tough to get going but, once underway, it plodded along nicely.

[robinruth]

We too seem to be in the DO CRAP spiral with no obvious way out of it. Perhaps making assumptions about what is/are dominoes is what is causing us the problem Philoctetes describes below. After two days of dull slog, we are not making much headway. Tough!

[robinruth]

I meant 'above' of course - starting to see things upside down!

[AHearer]

I only needed to consider the dominoes very near the end - everything else yielded to numerical logic. Somewhere in the DO CRAP stage, however, I at first stupidly rejected one possibility (essentially, by studpidly assuming that something was impossible which was indeed impossible for single-digit values for letters but perfectly possible for two-digits values).

[Cruncher]

robinruth - if it helps, I sussed L and E next. I didn't use the domino layout until the very end either.

[starwalker]

After making the same wrong assumption as AHearer, I have now completed the grid and identified all of my dominoes. Now I find myself staring at a seemingly meaningless string from 8, 31,18. I think that I shall take a break - I find it hard to believe that there is more than one possible fill for the grid.

[rabet]

Only just got round to looking at this. Here's the silly question for this week. The letters CAB or whatever ~ are they to be mulitplied together or do they simply mean the individual values are to be written in a line to form a single number?

[perseverer]

Rabet -they have to be multiplied.

[rabet]

Many thanks, perseverer

[x_word_fan]

Enjoyed that - clever how you couldn't guess exactly how to "completely" finish it until the very last clue was filled in.