The Magpie has bewildered those of us who enjoy surprising themed crosswords for two decades: let’s meet the Magpies
Around these parts, we have encountered some of the people behind the subscription magazine the Magpie, including Jason Crampton, AKA Jack in this paper’s Genius puzzles, and serial crossword champion Mark Goodliffe, as well as some of its setters, such as Chalicea.
What are the puzzles like? Well, we recently mentioned one, Two Grids with One Stone. Set by Twin, it had the two grids you would expect from the title, but only one set of across and one set of down clues. Each clue yielded, equally fairly, two different answers and, to the solver’s increasing astonishment, all the answers managed to fit with each other. More often, a puzzle has an unexpected theme, or a delightful endgame that reveals hidden messages in a filled grid.
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