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@hotelwhiskey

Ah, because there’s a Pythagorean triple involving that number, I’d thought it was triples!

I think I know how 22a works, but can’t solve it…

So I think I have the correct four words

Thanks

@smithsax

Don’t immediately see the connection there, but sounds like it’ll give me something to get going.

Thanks!

The hypotenuse of the triangle I described equals the radius of our circle, so the circle intersects precisely with 8 cell corners. All the cells intersected by the circle contribute to the quotation. Another radius would not work so neatly..

Yes, I’ve got the circles now, thank you!

Very clever, and very difficult…

Just need to find the play now

And I’m finally done! Utterly fiendish, so many levels of difficulty. Very clever indeed.

And thanks to the forum for help, I needed it!

Delightful construction. Tough with all the cold solving and jumbles, but the extra wordplay was an interesting device. Ingenious to find those quotations to do all they need to do!

Re the shading, I think we need to look at the preamble again, which clearly says we are to shade the “exactregion that the leading player specifically declares infeasible” (my emphasis). There may be other regions which we can deduce must be infeasible, since we are told that C is compulsory, such as A without C for example. But there is just one area which is *specifically* declared infeasible. At least, that’s how I read it.

Oh, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who skipped the whole business with the swapping pairs entirely. Too much ambiguity. Once the three labels are found it is obvious what quotation is needed, from a play with a nice long name with a Z in it, so that was that. I may pick this up again and work out all the pairs if I have the stamina sometime…!

I have a couple of parsing queries just to settle my mind. For 1A I just don’t see the extra wordplay for consecutive letters, which I think derived from the last four words. And for 14A the definition is nice and clear but I don’t really see either of the bits of wordplay. It’s probably just my overheated brain, so any little hintets to point me the right way would be greatly appreciated.

PS the problems with mapping natural language “and” to set-theoretic notions are frequent and well known. We can mean so many different things by “and”. If I say I want beans and carrots, I certainly don’t mean that I only want things that can be described as bean AND as carrot! I mean that I want some beans plus some carrots, i.e. everything on my plate should a bean OR a carrot. But if you tell me that there’s a rule that means I cannot have beans and carrots without also having broccoli, I don’t think it’s clear to me from that whether or not I could have just beans, or just carrots. What it does tell me, think, is that I cannot have just beans and carrots. Finding out what other combinations may be similarly barred would need further clarification, so couldn’t be said to have been specifically declared. Maybe.

Right, I’m going to bed now :-)

@adeano I don't think anyone responded re 21a.

The first four letters means a group of vineyards or a vintage. The last is an initial and it makes a term you might associate with port. Then jumbled of course but the full jumble only becomes clear at the end...as you'll have found.

Anyone still around who could give me a nudge on 1A or 14a? I just had another look back at them, and still can’t quite sort them out in my head.

1 Following 'a' for 'one' is a 5 letter word for 'even' (antonym of dirty) 'dressing'/covering the 2 letter abbrev.
14a - [Partial wordplay] 'see' = the usual 2 letters + the 1 letter abbrev for 'Henry' [inside 'h(ot)' + a 3 letter word for 'plays']. Full wordplay - ar*e and clot are the two 'tits' inside (plural) Hebrew letters (4 letters).

While I'm here I think it's worth mentioning the 'inaccurate' quote that's mentioned earlier. Yes, it appears online, but the quote as it appears here is exactly how ODQ gives it (apologies if this has been corrected subsequently, but hard copy 'research' appears to have fallen out of fashion). ODQ gives us three of the quotes, in fact.

One last thing - I really didn't want to get involved in the maths but, for me, it spoiled an otherwise very enjoyable theme and treatment. Why it was considered necessary for a crossword grid to be so precisely engineered is beyond me. I read a few lines of the theory and skipped the rest, then I moved to a simple grid-search and found what I was looking for, eventually (but far quicker than if I'd read and digested the tract in its entirety - one day someone will try writing one these with non-mathematicians in mind).