Crosswords

Since 2003, I set crossword puzzles for the British Mensa south-east region newsletter (SEMantics) up to six times a year, and I occasionally compose others which are more difficult than those. I offer both here to enthusiasts.

The downloads

Each puzzle offered here for download is available as a PDF file for access with Adobe Acrobat Reader. This makes pagination control easier (for me and for you) than providing them on HTML web pages. It means that I can be sure that you can easily print each puzzle onto a sheet of A4 paper to work on with a pencil.

The puzzles are here.

Level of difficulty

The crossword puzzles I do for the Mensa newsletter SEMantics are reckoned to be roughly at the same level of difficulty as the main daily crossword in The Times newspaper. This is not my judgement but that of a Mensan crossword expert, Steve Plater, who sets half of the puzzles for SEMantics. (I don’t have the time to read The Times or do its crosswords.)

The other puzzles offered are more difficult than those used in SEMantics. The first half dozen, compiled for opera fans, are harder because most people do not know all that much about opera and most of the clues and answers are about either opera or at least some aspect of music (not necessarily classical).

How to solve cryptic crosswords

See my introduction page How to solve cryptic crosswords and lots of cryptic clue examples. .

My crossword setting history

In the 1970s I compiled a few crosswords for the newsletter of the Manchester Opera Company (with which I sang, see story), and in the 1980s I set half a dozen for the newsletter of Opera Omnibus (now Opera South) to entertain company members and friends. Then, while I was Editor (from April 2000 to April 2005) of SEMantics, the south east England regional newsletter for British Mensa, the retirement of one regular & prolific setter of puzzles (Bryan Gabriel) led me to set some puzzles myself for the readers. After I retired as Editor there (after the issue for June 2005), I continued to run the crossword page including the prize draw for members, and, for a while, to set about half of the puzzles myself.

The puzzles

IPH0001 through IPH0006 appeared in the 1980s or 1990s in newsletters for members of Opera Omnibus. They have quite a few musical, indeed (chiefly) operatic, references. Also, some have a few answers that comprise several words and yet that are not actually well-known phrases, which makes them both non-standard in cruciverbal terms, and a bit harder to solve. I try not to do that any more, in puzzles that I set nowadays; still, you should be able to work out the answers from the clues with a bit of thought. 0001 is 11 × 11; 0002 to 0006 are 15 × 15.

 IPH0001  IPH0002  IPH0003  IPH0004  IPH0005  IPH0006

IPH0007 and IPH0008 date from summer 2005 and have never appeared elsewhere. They are a bit trickier than the usual standard used in SEMantics (the Mensa south east England newsletter), so I decided to put them here as occasional extras for crossword addicts among my fellow Mensans and others and not to use them for SEMantics. IPH0009 and upwards were written for my own amusement and to please fans of very difficult crossword puzzles. IPH0007, IPH0008, IPH0010, IPH0012, and IPH0013 are 13 × 13. IPH0009, IPH0011 are 15 × 15.

 IPH0007  IPH0008  IPH0009  IPH0010  IPH0011  IPH0012  
 IPH0013  IPH0014        

The following are the crosswords that I compiled for the British Mensa South East England regional newsletter SEMantics. All are 13 × 13 puzzles.

To convert from SEMantics issue number to date of issue, see table of issue numbers by month.

Note: I only offer here puzzles set by me. The copyrights in all puzzles composed by other people that appeared in SEMantics are the property of those people, and no information is offered here about whether those puzzles are available now. Generally, half of the puzzles used each year have been those crated by my cruciverbalist colleague Steve Plater. I have used his for odd numbered issues and mine for the rest. Gaps in the following table are where the corresponding puzzle was one set by one of the other people who has created an occasional puzzle, in which cases I generally took the opportunity of a month off from creating them myself.

 160  170  180  190  199  210  220  240
 161  172  182  192  202  212  222  232  242
 163  184  194  204  214  224  234  245
 166  176  186  195  206  216  226  236  246
 168  178  188  197  208  218  228  238  248