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I would be interested to hear of the proportion of solvers who genuinely enjoy these puzzles. I certainly don't and stopped bothering a long time ago. Printer's devilry was introduced by Afrit in 1937. The Playfair cipher was conceived by Charles Wheatstone in the 19th century and was used in the Boer War!

Intrigued by such devices rather than anything else. Have had limited success with Azed so shall have to treat it as a learning experience and look forward to the full blog!

a nice example of solving a playfair is in Dorothy Sayers's Have his carcase

I do not mind either as an occasional change of pace (emphasis on occasional). With Azed's PDs, I just take the tack that this is not a cryptic crossword, but something else, and forge ahead (which I did with no real issues this week, jono, just FYI :). Perhaps as an American I have the advantage that I regularly work all sorts of non-cryptic puzzles, and this is just one more in that category.

As for Playfairs, I just cheat and use the online keyword crackers and encrypt/decrypt sites that are out there on the interwebs (hangs head in shame).

When they come up in the Azeds I give them a miss and carry on working my way through the Azed archive. I find the Printer's Devilry a bit tedious and Playfair isn't my cuppa tea at all. I have done both in the past though.

Thanks for sharing your views - illuminating!

I do enjoy Azed's Printer's Devilry puzzles, once I get my head around the idea that the answers aren't definitions. It's something different, and they don't come up very often.
I happily use on-line solvers for Playfairs, as I can't be bothered with the hard slog. I see them as annoying, rather than clever. But then, I think that about many end games, as well.

The problem with playfairs is that no-one teaches you how to solve them, and the availability of an online cheat means that no-one will ever bother. But there is a logical path to unlocking them (much as there is with numericals - my least favourite Fridays). In this one the fact that, as it were, XY => YZ means that XYZ occur together in a row or a column gives you two possible paths. The other pair combinations rule one of them out pretty quickly, and after that it's a matter of seeing what's likely to be there, given that the later members of the alphabet are in the right order. X once set a playfair with CAB as the key word. I have no idea whether that was easier to crack, or harder.

They are certainly challenging and require a different mindset from regular cryptics. I have usuaĺly struggled, and indeed this is the first that I have completed. My issue with Azed (aka Jonathan Crowther) is the very large number of extremely obscure words; he seems to have a great liking for Scottish slang.

For those who are interested in learning about how you could solve a playfair 'mechanically', there is a recently posted (old) article on the new Crossword Club website here: https://www.thecrossword.club/articles