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Quisling, my first two moves are 2N and 3S, finishing at the other "O" of 22 down.

Thanks, 0pt0. They are correct, but the second move is three cells down from where the first move goes, so it lands on the S of 22d. The cell with the obelus is only a starting point; each other move is from where you have reached.

Thanks Quisling. I had obviously misunderstood your earlier conversation with Candledave. I will start again and see where that leads me.

Quisling, having re-traced the path, I have finished in the central square. Are you able to confirm whether this is correct within the rules of this forum?

The last letter of the first message is in a corner, but the last of the second is in the central cell, yes

Quisling, if I understand you correctly (which is doubtful, given my track record so far), when a move ends on a cell previously used in the path, it continues in the same direction until a vacant cell is reached. Is this correct and if so, how does one glean this from the preamble? The preamble refers to "previously unvisited cells", but this is in reference to the message rather than the path. The two are not necessarily the same in my opinion.

0pt0, I don’t think that’s right. When a move ends on a cell previously used in the path, the move is valid. But the letter landed on is ignored for the purposes of the message. So you then make the next move from the cell of the ignored letter. It doesn’t have to be in the same direction. You don’t repeat the previous move. The first path has 29 cells, not including the starting point, but gives a message of 24 letters. The first ignored repetition is on the 13th move.

There's no ambiguity in the instructions. One forms a path, then reads a message from the previously unvisited cells.

I've no idea how the setter created such a puzzle - thanks, Pandiculator!

I would call this an excellent example of a difficult but clear (and therefore fair) endgame. I much prefer a complex set of instructions to a GWIT. Although there were a couple of interpretations possible (the first cell of the message; each letter on the path, or those stepped upon; 'previously visited' by which path?), the endgame could be solved by plain and fair means. Which does differ to some recent endgames, of course not without their own merit.

I am astonished nobody has commented on the 'false path' laid in the middle column. I re-read the preamble many times and have settled on the letter completing the second entry to be highlighted, but my god, a second letter is tempting!

An excellent Listener - thanks Pandiculator!

For me it was spoiled by the second note being illegible with too many options for too many characters. Plus even the first note, while a clever idea, was just a painful slog to decode for me.

Hopefully we get a setters blog. Working out where the message letters had to be relative to each other would have been pretty straight forward.

If Pandiculator then created and filled a symmetrical grid by hand with those exact letter constraints then that is very, very impressive indeed.

If he just lobbed it into one of the programs that exist these days and told it to create a grid, then not so much.