Hope you've got fun plans for the evening. Looking forward to baked brie in brioche. Thanks to Philbo for a great week of reviews! Here, we get branching answers clued with "Before midnight" and "After midnight," each connected by the letter string BALL in a down clue.
I appreciate that the constructors eschewed cluing all five of those repeated "ball"s with a deflating "-" clue, and instead came up with five different clues. So that's four out of five. I also liked how 28A: Sloth, e. SIN echoed the first theme clue. It also made me very confused about the theme for a while! A favorite around our house Other fun clues include: A: Star sign? Philbo here, back with a vengeance today after a lukewarm performance yesterday - a friendly offering for a Saturday that took me just over 6 minutes to solve.
A peripheral New Year's theme, perhaps added as an afterthought - eight circled letters around the edges of the grid read CONFETTI , and when you complete the puzzle, the black squares transform into festively colourful shapes.
So that was a nice surprise and a fun way to wrap up my week of blogging. On second thought and look , maybe it wasn't such an afterthought after all: the black squares are all separate from one another - no two are adjacent - an impressive feat of setting and also distributes the confetti nice and evenly.
Anchoring the puzzle are 6 grid-spanning clues - 3 across and 3 down - all of which took fairly few crossers to figure out; of course, that was a tremendous help to the solve. I suspect that was the price paid for the unique layout - a bit of an easier shade to the clues.
