Tuesday 31 December 2013

Battle of the sexes

Today I have for your solving pleasure a 20x14 vowelless grid to celebrate the coming year. It features a quintuple stack in the center, as well, which is the product of weeks of tinkering with perl scripts to stack entries in various ways. My goal has been a sextuple stack, actually, and while I still believe it's possible, it wasn't happening in time for today's post. I guess a quintuple will have to do, since even this was an eleventh-hour construction.

The white space should make things pretty tough as is, so I went super easy on the cluing on this one.

Happy new year everybody!

More words, crossed and otherwise, next Tuesday

NOTE: Once again, Y is not a part of any answer, full or vowelless.

Puzzle: Vowelless #4
Rating: XW-PG
Difficulty: The easiest one yet (but still hard)
Downloads:
PDF (with enumerations)
PUZ (with enumerations)
PDF

6 comments:

e.a. said...

impressive. still way too hard for me.

Howard B said...

Loving the vowelless. Still can't finish the crossings with Tom Robbins novels. Haven't read him, and the titles aren't solvable before or after crossings. So he's broken me every time :).
(I couldn't parse 46A for a letter, but that was my brain cramp).
Lots of fun here, and the clues are just about in that sweet spot for a vowelless, where you need the extra push to help explain the long answers when needed.

Thanks!

Bananarchy said...

Yeah, vowellesses are tricky business for sure. I swear that's it for Tom Robbins titles! I wouldn't ever use them as grid-spanning seeds in a vowelless, but both times they've been the only entries that would fit.

jefe said...

The Robbins was the last for me too, though I did manage to figure out the reading afterwards (with some effort).

Fave was 7D, and all the long downs were solid. Actually, pretty much everything was solid. Great puzzle!

Keenan Mahoney said...

My first vowelless, had a great time! Couldn't crack the cross at 5D and 19A (the middle word at 19A somehow didn't appear to me until that letter was dropped in) and couldn't figure out how to get another letter into 55D. Really fun, glad I got the easiest one so far as my first else I'd have been in some trouble!

Unknown said...

Epic. You haven't have ruined me for all other vowellesseses.