Puzzles that stem from the setting partnership that is Rood occur out of desperation. I (RO) asked for OD’s help as I was stuck with my tesseract Listener puzzle and this time it was OD’s return to plead for assistance. An email came through in February 2012 suggesting a theme based on the wall game from the Only Connect quiz show. Sixteen 9-letter anagrams in 3 x 3 squares making up four groups. OD’s words “may be impossible to achieve” looked extremely likely but it was a challenge I couldn’t resist. After a quick attempt my reply to OD was “this is scarily difficult”. An early grid fill started with Oxbridge colleges, battles and capes (with Worcester and Trafalgar linked with more than one group) but the grid came to a swift dead end. It would have been nice to have a “twist” where an anagram could be a member of more than one group, as often occurs in the real game, but our priority at this stage was to get a full grid.

It was time to take a step back and make life easier. We had to come up with as many “long” lists of related 9 letter words as possible. A rather large Excel spreadsheet was devised from a number of sources. Luckily OD has a library full of useful references, whilst I only had the computer for assistance (obviously the modern age setter needs to invest in a library). Some of these lists e.g. animals, plants and writers had a reasonable number of options and were worth a stab, but time and time again the grid could not be finished often getting to the last 3 x 3 square usually in one of the lower corners. We decided that if we had to revert to jumbled entries the puzzle was not worth pursuing, but realised early on that symmetry had to be abandoned; the priority now was getting this elusive full grid. Oil struck but the word count was pathetic to say the least and the grid was scrapped. Finally, after at least 30 fresh attempts between us a grid was filled with castles, dances, carriages and woods/trees; the latter was not an ideal group because of the linkage of two similar themes, but hey I am sure the editors would be understanding enough to give us leeway.

At this point another idea struck as I scanned through the grid; it just so happened with a slight tweak that the conversion of 11 letters into clashes gave us ONLY CONNECT across the grid. Well almost – the 11 columns were slightly out of sync with ONLYC ONNECT, but there seemed no remedy for this. We were therefore content to start work on the clues.

OD is often after a thematic device, so we wondered about having four of them akin to the four groups in the wall. By removing a few bars and altering a couple of entries with the help of OED we had 48 entries, giving us 12 in each cluing group. We decided on clues with moving words, missing letters (akin to the missing vowel round from the show), anagrams and a gimmick utilising connections. It also seemed we had given ourselves another tough task. Although there is a slight leeway as we had 4 clues in every set of gimmicks, we still had to pick our phrase carefully. At this stage we chose USE FOUR COLOURS TO GROUP SIXTEEN THREE BY THREE ANAGRAMS. (Actually our very first, similar, phrase had TWELVE anagrams, which somehow satisfied both of us … only when we were having the puzzle tested did we recall that 4×4 does not actually amount to twelve, so a few clues had to be rewritten to accommodate the infant school maths correction). The puzzle then went off to the Magpie editors. What could go wrong…in a word: rejection!

Not for the OED words, not for the abstract castles, not for the plural of one of the trees, not even the strange connection cluing gimmick (although they preferred something different), it was because of a type of wood called CALIATURE. Listed in OD’s Bradford’s we included it, but given it is in Chambers under the headword caliature-wood, the editors felt it was not precise enough to allow the puzzle to be published. A panic look at the caliature square meant there was no way we could rectify the situation – back to the drawing board.

Solvers may be able to complete a thematic puzzle in a couple of hours, but this had already taken an inordinate amount of time to set, but now we had to start again. How were we going to get a full grid, let alone one with 48 entries, and clashes to make the fortuitous inclusion of ONLY CONNECT? I had more matters pressing than Pieman at that stage and handed the baton back to OD. There is no point prolonging the history of Fourplay mentioning the same difficulties as before, but OD managed to start a grid with four categories (the same four as you solved in the final puzzle) and I took over to see if I could finish off the grid fill. Luck or judgement, sometimes I cannot tell, but this time we had no ambiguity, no plurals and ONLY CONNECT worked with the space in the fifth column, perfect…or not! The clues seemed impossible using the previous phrase. With a slight tweak of the phrase, together with a different cluing gimmick (the editors were not keen on the shifting connections gimmick), we came up with a final edition of the published puzzle.

Setting as individuals in the Magpie as well as all of the other advanced thematic crossword outlets that appear in the national newspapers, this has to be our toughest challenge yet (together or individually). Despite that it is the most satisfying puzzle we have set so far. We hope you have enjoyed the ride although you may not see a Rood puzzle for a while…unless desperation hits again.

Posted on Monday, August 12th, 2013 at 8:33 am under Setting the scene.
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