Crossword Help Forum
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scarlett,
If you are looking for meaning of "on vacation" , middle letters are removed.
So rabbi is RI.

scarlett:
I may have misunderstood. You may be asking for help with end game. My bad.

I need help with two:

16 Small amount of money for graft of great writer (4)

34 Old venture outside of city of Paris (4)
Thanks.

sunray:
16. S(mall) oriental currency, last four words are definition.
34. Venture (three letters) around O, and think Trojan wars.

sunray ... yes i need help with the endgame.

Thanks Throck.
It took me a while to get which Paris the clue meant.

I don't know what a map index is. Is it the same as an index map? That's all I can find on the internet and there's nothing in the dictionaries, not that index maps suggest much anyway.

I thought vacation might mean using only the first and last letters, in which case 1a would be RY. That gives me a town in Denmark, or maybe the letter M from the grid.

And why does the preamble say "across clues, down clues, and answers" [sic], instead of all clues and answers? Is there any significance in that rather clumsy way of putting things?

Orson, Harribobs has set puzzles like this before. I think we've to treat the grid as a map, using the left-hand column and bottom row as map indexes. We then, I assume, have to plot every single across clue, down clue and answer on this. The 'vacation' of 1 A would lead to us plotting RY. After doing all of this, I think we'd end up with a map, and inside there's likely to be some capitals. I decided there was too much work involved in all of this - so I didn't even get as far as doing the 'map indexes'!

In a previous Harribobs puzzle, when the dots were joined, there was an illustration of a bat. Very clever - but very time-consuming.

As far as I can see, if we "vacate" everything we have to use the first letter as the y-axis (northing) and the last as the x-axis (easting) -- which is not the usual "along the corridor and up the stairs" order. I suspect I have lost the thread somewhere.

Thanks, malone and throck. I did suspect that was the case, malone, but it did seem a lot of work when I wasn't even sure it was the right way to proceed. And, throck, I noticed that it would have to be y-axis before x-axis and that made me doubtful.

Well, it started nicely but after finding the 4 cities and getting most of the outline it seems to have crashed!

I can't get sensible coordinates from the grid answers using the same technique - and I can't get the six 'capitals' (unless they're just single letters - and I don't think Harribobs would resort to such a fudge).

The other problem is 6+4 isn't enough, I make the total 13 (and I'd expect them all, given the precision of that other Harribobs puzzle).