March/April 1980

TERM 2 The birth of the 1980s - Blake’s 7, Blondie and battles in space

Florence Nightingale What if Florence Nightingale had lived in the Year 2000?

More Puzzlers

Super Jesus A special pin-up of your favourite Nazarene webslinger

< Fury Falls

The Hulk (1) >

Continuing the puzzle theme I already established with Topic Book Word Find and A-Maze-ing, here’s a trio of grid-based games which you might find vaguely frustrating for all the wrong reasons. The top two are word-based crossword-type puzzles in which the words read the same across as they do down, and the one at the bottom appears to be similar but with numbers. First, the good stuff: the first two can actually be completed. They’re not especially taxing, but they might actually cause your brain to think a little. The conceit of having the words read the same across as down is clever and I’m quite impressed I pulled that top one off at eight years old. You can tell from the actual clues that I didn’t copy this from somewhere else, so while I doubt the idea was mine, I feel pretty confident the actual content is a Waen Shepherd original. I also like the way I drew a pair of eyes underneath the W in the title to make it look like a pair of angry (‘cross’) eyebrows. On the other hand: the clues are a bit rubbish. At least one of the answers is a totally made-up word. The second puzzle with three words of three letters each is disappointing after the one with five of five. The bottom puzzle with the numbers doesn’t appear to have a clear idea behind it or a single specific solution. And I’ve diluted the clever effect of the angry eyebrows in the W by turning the O next to it into what looks like another eye, this time with its own set of eyebrows - yes, one eye with two eyebrows - the kind of set-up that would only appear on the face of a cartoon comedy cyclops. In case you’re time poor and need the answers spelling out, here they are: Puzzle One B L A Z E L O S E R A S K E R Z E E R O E R R O R Puzzle Two D O G O O O G O D Puzzle Three I’m not even going to bother with this one. I don’t even know what it’s trying to do. Was I trying to invent Sudoku and just getting the central idea completely wrong? I think I might have been a bit late anyway. Am I missing something here? Is it cleverer than I think it is and I’m just too stupid now to see it? Or is it just me age 8 trying to fill space in an exercise book? Last note: I’m intrigued by my use of the word ‘God’ here. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t that sold on the God thing, even as a little kid - I could never quite get past the whole ‘If God made us, who made God?’ part, so it never seemed like a satisfying solution to the central mysteries of existence - so I have to assume I just used the ‘He made us’ clue as convenient shorthand to help you find the right word. I definitely wouldn’t have expected it to be subjected to this amount of scrutiny. But it’s interesting to see it here, given the appearance of Super Jesus a few pages earlier. Maybe it’s an early indication that I was starting to take these questions seriously?

Puzzlemaster Help Puzzlemaster escape the clutches of the Martian spacelords!

Captain Starlight Know your Starlight superheroes with this amazing fact file!

The Yellyog Gang Meet my latest hideous bunch of nutty nightmare fuellers