Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

It's a numerical puzzle this week, so the usual wording will be useless.

Help with the clues and help with the theme can be sought here. All relevant information should be given by those seeking assistance. The 'help' should be a pointer or two, a gentle nudge in the right direction - not anything that would spoil the puzzle for others. Anything deemed too revealing is likely to be removed.

The Listener is a unique puzzle and should be treated with respect.

Immediately confused as to the rule that "all operations in the clue are non-trivial, ie the resulting value is different from the operand(s)" -- I think I must be misunderstanding what this means because to my reading, that rules 0 out from being every possible letter. Each letter is involved in at least one operation which, if the letter is 0, would result in 0, which would mean the result doesn't differ to one of its operands. Am I just misreading?

Never mind, I overlooked something--apologies. (My reading of the preamble was, I think, correct.)

Having identified the letter representing zero, I assume you are now racing to a solution! It hasn't helped me a jot.

Sadly I am in the same boat!

I started getting into The Listener around the Root 66 puzzle a few months ago and I remember staring at that one without making any progress at all for hours. Never did finish it. So I have been dreading the return of a numeric Listener puzzle.

However, I'm pleased to say that this one went fairly well. Pretty much regular progress from the beginning right up until the end. This is my first number Listener that I've ever finished. So thanks for that Child's Play!

Spent an enjoyable couple of hours teasing out all the letters and so have a close to full grid. Now hit a brick wall with the last two entries. Not obvious to me how you get the (square + prime)' answers without brute forcing a spreadsheet, which I don't have access to as am on holiday. Will continue to ponder, maybe inspiration will strike ...

Probably worth your while doing the letter substitution at that point as you may easily see some of the set members (if they are in your fields of interest). Forgetting there was a ' in each of the long clues cost me a good hour as well.

All sorted and huge congrats to Child's Play for the design.

I've put the letters in and I can't see anything. But misreading square × prime as square + prime was a bit daft. I can see we've got a fighting chance with square times prime.

I've filled the grid but any help in finding the ten members of a set, sequenced conventionally would be most appreciated. My decoding seems gobbledegook.