Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Significant if you add the next three letters.
I finished the grid fill on Saturday morning but despite hours of trying I still have three targets to find.
I think I may have made an error but cant track it down.
I still have A B and G to fit into the top two obstacles and and the fifth cell on row 9. I assume the three targets are associated.
Is this correct? If not I give up. If OK a hint would be welcome. Maybe word lengths and direction (up down left right diagonal etc) and which letter in which cell.

Orson, yes the obstacle cells receive 6 of the extra letters.

Smithsax, the letters used for obstacle cells (numbering rows top to bottom) : row 4 M, row 5 L, row 8 BP, row 9 G and row 11 C. There are 6 across targets (2 are on the same row) : 9, 5, 5, 8, 6, 6 (the 5th of those in reverse). The other 4 targets are in columns : 6,4,7,10

Thanks, meursault. I think I've finished but my vertical targets are in columns 4, 9, 10 and 11.

Person, don’t worry, you are correct. Meursault was just giving the word lengths

Sorry, orson. My autocorrect assumed you were a person ...

Thanks meursault. I had managed to make “mallard” in 7 contiguous cells near the centre using available letters. The word doubled back on itself (mall on one line and dra on the line below). I thought this was what the preamble meant by “beating a retreat” and could not see my mistake when checking.
It then of course left me with all the wrong letters for the last couple of targets.

You're welcome, Smithsax. I never even spotted that possibility (which is fortunate), though I did muse for a while about the possibility of 'mallard' in an approximate chevron on the left hand side. I've forgotten now why I discarded that idea, but probably because I was eventually finding more and more straight line solutions.

Thanks Wintonian and to others for their input as ever. In case anyone is still stuck, it helped that all the targets are in Bradford’s. I have two of another sort as pets 8-).

The classic game of two halves this one for me. Thought the grid fill was excellent, the idea of the obstacle / deflection cells was very good and an all round very enjoyable couple of hours.

Then 3 very tedious hours trying to source obscure names of birds, half of which weren’t on any lists I could find on the internet. Very, very tedious endgame, as Meursault mentioned earlier in the thread.

One say Poat will set a puzzle where the endgame is shorter than the gridfill, hopefully.

Rrrobbo - I don’t have Bradford’s and it sounds like it would have saved me a lot of time here. I googled it and there seems to be a dictionary and a book of lists. Which is more useful, do I need both?

Thanks