Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

As of 00.12hrs, this week's Prize crossword is under the "Cryptic" heading on the Guardian website rather than the usual "Prize".

It's a Maskarade Xmas special but is sadly not interactive so I'll be sitting this one out.

Happy Christmas to all the the Prize blog contributors and readers and good luck with this week's puzzle - it looks a belter:-)

Stay safe:-)

Thanks for the pointer. I was looking in the Prize section of course. Equally disappointed by the PDF, as I don't have a printer, so I cobbled together a spreadsheet version, which, in the spirit of the season, I uploaded to Wormhole, in case anyone else is similarly stymied.

k0QQm#xz5-JwL0iVDoFHA0BJhU4w

I'm not allowed to post URLs, so go to wormhole dot app and paste that string at the end of the URL. What a palaver. YMMV.

Haven't started it yet. Will be back here I suspect in a day or two.

Many thanks Plutocrat, I use Open Office but it still works.

PS - I had to insert a forward slash between 'wormhole.app' and info hash.

Hi all and Merry Cbristmas to all contributors.
Not too tricky, but be prepared for some serious misdirection in the preamble section.

Merry Christmas all and thanks for all your help in 2022. I can't even entertain this until I have bought a hard copy of the paper. I shall be dipping in and out over the next few days.

See you later.

Where the heck do you start on this ? Any easy ones to get going ??? Merry Christmas everyone :-)

I normally panic at these complex jumbos and get overwhelmed but I'm being brave and tackling this methodically because I know the forum will have my back :-). I'm starting with the standard clues on the right and have a fair few in for a toehold, thank goodness. Going to concentrate on that for now before I even look at the rest!

Hi Tonystock
Try solving as many of the standard clues on the right as you can. The capitalised words in the preamble are also clues, sometimes synonyms, sometimes definitions, sometimes cryptic. As a hint, note that 14 appears twice in the preamble.

I'll give this a miss.
The grid is too big to print out on a single A4 page.

Many thanks Plutocrat - I admire both your patience in constructing this and your generosity in sharing it!

Happy Christmas!