Azed – A Time of Change
The latest puzzles are now linked from the Observer Azed page at
which also has links to two new articles, ‘How to Solve Azed & Gemelo’ and ‘Monthly puzzle and clue-writing competition: terms & conditions’.
The online clue submission facility is now working, with all entries going initially to Tortoise. It is important to check your grid entries before submitting – the app accepts whatever you supply, and any incorrect answers will result in your entry subsequently being disqualified, as would have happened in the past. The clues submitted by those who have correctly completed the grid will be anonymized and sent to Azed for judging; once he has made his decision, they will be reconnected with their authors and the results published. Azed will produce a monthly Slip as usual.
Currently, the steps for submission are as follows:
- Complete the grid and click ‘Submit’.
- You will be prompted for your name and email address. Enter these, and click ‘Submit’.
- You will see a form with ‘Puzzle submitted’ at the top, which should have ‘COMPETITION – scroll down to submit’ towards the bottom. If you don’t see that text, you need to scroll down in order for it to display.
- Scroll further down the Google form to see the boxes for your email address, your address, your clue, and the explanation. Enter these, and click ‘Submit’.
- You should see a panel headed ‘COMPETITION – scroll down to submit’ (slightly confusingly) – the important thing is that below this it says “Thank you for entering the Azed monthly clue-writing competition”.
- That’s it. You will receive an email, subject “COMPETITION – scroll down to submit” which will have confirmation of what you entered on the form. An example of the mail that you should received is linked here.
Don’t be put off by the Google form being called ‘COMPETITION – scroll down to submit’; I imagine that Tortoise are working behind the scenes to tidy this aspect up a bit, but to be honest once we’ve all gone through the process a couple of times we probably won’t be looking too closely anyway.
If you’ve accidentally submitted a blank or incomplete puzzle without getting to the point of supplying your email address, home address etc, all is not lost. The data that you have entered (or not entered!) is saved in a cookie, so if you exit the Observer site, delete all cookies from ‘observer.co.uk’, and then go back in, you should find that you have a blank grid and will be able to start again. With Edge, for instance, you can go into Settings->Cookies and site permissions->Cookies and site data->See all cookies and site data, filter the list down to ‘observer.co.uk’ and then click Remove. On Safari, it’s Settings->Apps->Safari->Advanced->Website Data->Edit, then select ‘observer.co.uk’ for deletion.
It has also been announced that with immediate effect Azed will be setting only the puzzles for the monthly competitions. The remaining puzzles will be set by Colin Thomas (who may be familiar to some solvers as Twin), under the nom de clef Gemelo (the Spanish for ‘twin’). This will enable Azed to significantly reduce his workload, which seems entirely reasonable after producing a puzzle week in, week out for 53 years 4 months. To describe his achievements as extraordinary falls a long way short of doing them justice. Let us hope that this sharing of the load will mean that Azed can continue to entertain us for a good while yet.
For those attending the last and very recent lunch this was perhaps very much ‘around the corner’. Nothing will be the same – it’s not the best newspaper so it’s once a month from now on. John Kitchen
Hi John, and welcome to the blog.
It seems to me little short of miraculous that in 98 years the Observer barred cryptic has had only three setters, and that 53 years have passed since the last change of any significance, three months before the Watergate scandal broke.
I hope that you – like me – will give Gemelo a go, particularly given that the puzzles will be available FOC on the Observer web site.