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Where does one start to encode every entry ? Surely something more than guesswork as to the Playfair phrase ?

Hi, jogamel,

For six clues you have to insert three letters (all of a type) into the answers to make another proper word which has nothing to do with the clue.

Sorry, replied to the wrong post. Ignore the above!

I share your perplexity, son1ofrover1. The 'self-referential' nature of the task seems impossible to attempt without some guesswork at the start: I can't see any elegant way in. At this time, there are no postings on the Answerbank site, which is very unusual more than 24 hours after the puzzle was released; this suggests to me that it is exceptionally difficult and that it's the encoding that's the problem, rather than solving the clues.

There is a thread on the Answerbank site and there are essentially two people who seem to have found it straightforward. I don't know how they do it.

I was wondering whether the code-square in the middle is itself Playfair encoded. I've made guesses with Boxing Day and just Boxing for the phrase but with no luck.

I'm not doing Listener, but I had a quick glance at it earlier. Re the title, I wondered about Stephen - isn't today his day? (And also when presents, in boxes, were dished out?)

Great minds (allegedly) think alike - so clearly do lesser ones like mine. I also tried Boxing Day and Boxing, but no luck. Stephen won't work as all letters in a Playfair word have to be different. The last 3 letters of the 5x5 square yield pretty easily, but it gets tougher after that. I was surprised to find that I could solve almost all the across clues in well under an hour, but a second hour on the downs has yielded only 5. I wonder if the down clues were deliberately made harder. It could be that more alcohol has been consumed of course.

In a similar fix myself. 41across suggests that DAY cannot appear if the start of the word is not coded. It will look better in the morning no doubt. Does the play fair word have to avoid repeated letters or are they just omitted?

I have the codeword. I used 41ac and 23ac to give me three letters of the word. One of these letters was "unusual" which meant I could use the app Advanced Crossword Solver (a superb resource for iPad) to list all the anagrams with increasing numbers of unknown letters. I eventually found a result that gave me 12 different letters.... and hey presto the phrase worked! Good luck.

Rickye, the playfair keyword won't have any letters recurring (and none omitted).

Orson, 41's answer is WYCH, so it's likely that the last row of the playfair square is *WXYZ or **WYZ. Then the first two cells of the 41 entry would be YZ. If you consider the same happening for all the entries which extend into the playfair square, then I suppose the square itself is encoded...

I've done enough cold-solving to give quite a few intersections. Eg 13 SPADER and 14 ACETIC. Which gives the results of encoding AD and AC sharing the same first letter, perhaps suggesting that these letters are all aligned on a rank or file of the playfair square, eg. DA*C
or CA*D. Which suggested 'Boxing Card' - but that doesn't work out.

Various guesses are worth entertaining, the middle cell of the second rank up being Q, and K being in one of the barred off cells of the central rank, etc.

I've a few things on, but hope to look at this again in the evenings next week...