“Money Matters” from “Veeyares” was our third grid for 2026.

Stats: 51 solvers attempted this puzzle.  41 solvers managed to complete the puzzle and the bonus forms. As many as 38 solvers got the full score.

Try the puzzle here
(Annotations will be visible on solving the puzzle or on clicking “Reveal Grid”. Logged in solvers can see their submissions as well)

Bonus Questions:

Identify the theme

Here’s the list of Top Scorers (For the full list, please check the Leaderboard in the Hall of Fame)

Logged in users can also view their submissions in this page. This is a new feature – please let me know if this works fine.

Out of 51 solvers,  41 completed and submitted the grid and bonus form, of which 38 got the full score. Each of the following scored 148 points (Grid Score – 146,  Bonus – 2).

Arun Hiregange
Arvind Ramaswamy
Ashit Hegde
Binay Patra
Devi Prasad
Harish T.K.
Himanshu Rajurkar
Ian J VanderSchee
Jose A
Jyothish B.
Krittibas Dasgupta
Lakshmi A J Vaidyanathan
Lakshmi Prakash
Madhup Tewari
Max Jackson
Mona Sogal
Mukundala Balasubramanyam
NARAYANAN R
Narayana Swamy D.
Nilesh Parmar
Panyam Tejas
Paul Henderson
Prakash Arumugam
Ramachandra Nagendra Prasad
Ramki Krishnan
Ranjani Srikanth
Ratna Rao
Ratnakumar V
Samit Kallianpur
Sampath Shrinivasan
Sandhya Paruchuri
Shobha Nayak
Sparsh Sinha
Steve Gunter
Supriya Mithal
Usha Dronamraju
Venkatesan P.
Venkatraghavan S

Congrats to the toppers and to all the solvers who participated.

Grid Rating: The puzzle got a good rating of 8.5. It was rated a perfect 10 by 9 out of the 41 folks who voted (22%). The lowest rating was 7.

Favourite Clues:  The Top clues were

1. 14A: Ideal period mostly to wear gemstone (7) 12 votes
2. 22A: Checks luxury car that is entering local street initially ((8) 10 votes
3. 5D: Money withdrawn, locks bank up (6) 10 votes
4. 7D: In the end, George lost our money (4) 8 votes
5. 17A: Government construction worker heading off to get old money (7) 7 votes

Thanks Veeyares for a fun puzzle which was thoroughly enjoyed by solvers. Looking forward to more from you.

PS: The solvers comments are in the comments thread in the post itself.