crackingthecryptic
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Mark solves Simon's Incredible 2004 Puzzle
🕑 Added 2023-01-27 10:00:02 +0000 UTCBack in 2004, in the second year of The Magpie (see www.piemag.com ), Simon's monthly puzzle was Circling the Square by Pieman, an incredibly hard advanced thematic cryptic crossword - remembered well by all of the few who solved it!
Here Mark tries it again for the first time in 18 years,and comments on the wonderful inventiveness and astonishing denouement of this puzzle. After watching the intro, you can certainly jump over the two full hours of cryptic clue solving to watch the endgame (from 2h19m in): it'll be worth your while!
Here is the video: https://youtu.be/AACKl707020
Comments
Wow! That was dedication to go back through through all the videos. Thank you.
I was purposely avoiding watching the video to avoid spoilers. When I did finally watch the video, I heard this. Maybe next time this will be in the show notes.
A.W.
A little late, but Mark said in the video the puzzle is available for purchase on the Magpie’s websarchive
I found this from 2019, but it was Mark explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FZo0fnIL1U
Sigh. If you watch the first ten minutes, you don't see that three down clues have fallen off the bottom edge.
Simon once showed the final trick of this puzzle on the channel, if I recall correctly. It was several years ago though. Just over an hour into the video and I'm now certain of it as I recall what the trick is, and it's all coming together.
Ewen McNeill
The puzzle is a blank grid (13x13 from memory), a title, some instructions, and a bunch of cryptic clues. They’re all shown in the video near the start, before solving starts. I think you could screenshot them, from the first 10 minutes of the video, and then just stop it if you wanted to try solving yourself first. Mark takes around 2 hours just on the cryptic clues so spoilers don’t happen that quickly :-) Ewen
Is there any way of getting a copy of the puzzle before watching the video. It would be fun to give it a try first.
