Stats – We had 51 submissions – a great response to our latest grid. Of those who submitted 42 managed to complete the grid with zero errors and went on to get the maximum possible score of 145. We had a few first time solvers.
You can play the puzzle in full screen mode here
Here’s the Score card (sorted by total and then alphabetically).
Congrats to the 42 solvers who maxed the score and to every one who participated. Very well tried.
Grid Rating: The puzzle got a good score of 8.36. It got 12 perfect 10s – i.e roughly 1 in 4 of those who submitted thought it was perfect. The minimum score was 1.
Top 3 Clues: The most favorite clues were for “TORNADOS” with 12 votes, “NATAL” with 11 and “PATH FINDER” with 9 votes each. Every clue in the grid got atleast 1 vote.
Hope you all enjoyed this entertaining puzzle. Thanks to Sphinx and to all our solvers for your support and wonderful comments. Sharing these comments with our readers..
Comments from solvers:
- Thanks.
- ENJOYED SOLVING
- Enjoyed solving it.
- most appropriate and very enjoyable, a couple of minor issues which are really not of great consequence.
- Good balance of easy & tough words.
- Great grid , challenging and enjoyable,very topical
- Nice puzzle, practically all clues having a nice surface and interesting wordplay. HIPS type of clues nicely concealed. Not convinced with construct of 19d, ‘case’ should take only the borders leaving out all contents, and not a selective range from either side
- great fun, Had to have a couple of coffees..
- GOOD GRID! HAD FUN!
- This is the first one of your puzzles that I’ve tried. It was definitely different, but certainly none the worse for that. The difficulty level was about right for me – not a shoo-in, but doable. Some of the clues were a bit convoluted but some were very elegant! Not having any others to compare it against, I’ve given the ranking a nominal 5.
- Tough one ! Could complete the grid only after self-isolation.
- First submission. Thanks for the puzzles!
- Excellent mindbender
- Excellent puzzle!! I wonder if the circled letters should have been more “socially distanced”, six squares apart. 🙂
- Interesting grid… tough but was able to annotate all the clues.
- KEEP THEM COMING SPHINX!
- Super clues with lovely surfaces
- Very intriguing and intricate to form a phrase out of circled letters
- Pretty tough – still can’t anno a few word – got them from crossing letters
- At the outset it looked very difficult. But after getting a few answers, enjoyed solving. Many good clues and it is difficult to select top three
- Great puzzle
- Some vague answers, but those may be grid-fill constraints. Otherwise, a nice easy puzzle
- some words were super tough and I didn’t understand 3-4 solutions even though I got them
- Deceptively simple to start with, got progressively harder and the SW corner was extremely tough. Overall an enjoyable puzzle, and clues were fair.
- Testing puzzle. Enjoyed solving, but had to keep at it to complete.
- Fairly good puzzle , several Aha ! moments
- Very nice puzzle.
- SUPER
- Great grid – struggled for a bit but it all fell into place in the end! Thanks x
- Enjoyable, grid, many clever clues, some of them hard. Nice topical theme too.
- good mix of challenging and smooth clues.
- Slightly tough puzzle but v enjoyable
- Very poorly written and riddled with unfairness.
- Enjoyable grid, nice clues.
- Very nice, enjoyable set of clues.
- Enjoyed solving the puzzle
- Excellent and challenging
- I know my answer to 18 is wrong. Sorry.