Stats: The puzzle page had over 800 views and was attempted nearly 450 times. We had 68 submissions of which 42 were correct.
Solutions:
After solving the individual clues, these answers needed to be placed in the Grid correctly. So the animals in Clue 1 and Clue 3 had to be entered in “Cages” 3 and 1 instead. Similarly the answers to Clue 2 and 5 had to be swapped. The answer for Clue 4 remained in the correct location,
Clue 1: Animal feels lot heavier inside (5)
SLOTH – Hidden in plain sight
Clue 2: Animal arrived at lake (5)
CAMEL – CAME + L(Lake)
Clue 3: All giving love for a mammal (5)
WHALE – WH(-o+A)LE
Clue 4: Beast’s one following fine tailless monkey(5)
OKAPI OK+AP(-e)+I
Clue 5: Animal protecting bird in two hands (5)
LEMUR L(EMU)R
Here is the list of people who got it correct and their feedback on the puzzle.
| S No | Name | Comments | Rating | |
| 1 | Priya Shyam | 5 – Excellent | ||
| 2 | VENKATRAGHAVAN SAHASRANAMAN | Not as straightforward, given the rearranging that one has to do. Good workout for the brain after solving the cryptic | 5 – Excellent | |
| 3 | Tejas Siddharth | Wow. Just wow. Deceptively tricky. Loved it. First crossword, then basic aptitude. Brilliant. 7/5. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 4 | Suyash Roongta | 4 – Good | ||
| 5 | Nick | Wonderfully done 🙂 Great clues, good level of difficulty. Surfaces of 1 and 3 not quite there for me but OKAPI and LEMUR are tremendous. Like the jumbling part at the end. A bit of mastermind wordplay. I’m going to try make one 🙂 | 4 – Good | |
| 6 | Ratna Rao | Awesome one as always | 5 – Excellent | |
| 7 | Ian VanderSchee | I like the extra challenge for this one! | 5 – Excellent | |
| 8 | V RATNAKUMAR | simply amazing, i am getting animated……. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 9 | Debasmita Basu | The twist was fun. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 10 | Aashwina mouli (2nd Attempt) | 4 – Good | ||
| 11 | N Anantakrishnan | Absolutely wonderful. Maybe the pictures are not required when the theme is already defined. The switching was a neat trick, adding to the fun! | 5 – Excellent | |
| 12 | Madhusudan H | Not sure about the H in OCHRE, because the H in GREEN seems sufficient to fill the second letter in the slot. I may be way off the answer. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 13 | Mohsin | Very interesting and inventive. Lot of fun | 5 – Excellent | |
| 14 | Madhup Tewari | Very nice twist with swapping of pairs. Excellent! | 5 – Excellent | |
| 15 | Hema ramanathan | I need to read the instructions. Spent too much time not realizing why Llama doesn’t work. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 16 | Radhika Anand (2nd Attempt) | Loved this! Innovative puzzle | 5 – Excellent | |
| 17 | Al Sanders | Fun, I liked the additional puzzle of figuring out what had switched | 5 – Excellent | |
| 18 | Himanshu Rajurkar | 5 – Excellent | ||
| 19 | Alison Crutchfield | 5 – Excellent | ||
| 20 | William Dunbar | My first Xwordle. This was fun, thanks! | 5 – Excellent | |
| 21 | Barry Balof | Fun puzzle…the pictures made the animals a bit easier to get, but I liked both the cryptic element and the wordle play. Nicely done! | 5 – Excellent | |
| 22 | VENKATESAN P. | Applied a lot of permutations and combinations such that no unwanted letter appears in the green and ochre cells. Hope my logic is correct. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 23 | LV | Love it 🙂 | 5 – Excellent | |
| 24 | Suresh Dorbala | Loved it | 5 – Excellent | |
| 25 | Ganesh Raman | 5 – Excellent | ||
| 26 | amrita | 5 – Excellent | ||
| 27 | Geoff Lee | So simple but I still had to run a brute search (sorry, irresistable) for the final order! | 5 – Excellent | |
| 28 | Ramesh Swaminathan | “*****” moved LOL that had me stuck a while | 5 – Excellent | |
| 29 | Arvind Ramaswamy | I wonder how “*****” & “*****” exchanged cages 🙂 (if my answer is right that is) | 4 – Good | |
| 30 | Max Jackson | I cheated by doing a wordsearch with the known selection of first two letters, then working backwards from the presumed answer.
Testing combinations of correct and swapped picture answers seemed like too much effort. Sorry. |
4 – Good | |
| 31 | Mona Sogal | Tough but good brain Gym..you are a master quizzer Sowmya 🙂
If my answer is correct H in Ochre is unnecessary? |
4 – Good | |
| 32 | Krishnan Anantheswaran | Both my spouse and myself had a very enjoyable 30m figuring this out. Thanks for an excellent puzzle. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 33 | N Rengaswamy | Interesting. | 4 – Good | |
| 34 | ASHIT HEGDE (2nd Attempt) | Have upgraded my rating. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 35 | Arunthathi C | 4 – Good | ||
| 36 | Lewis Shipp | An opportunity to exercise my Excel chops. Loved the puzzle. | 5 – Excellent | |
| 37 | Matt Zinno | Not submitted in the blog | ||
| 38 | Alex | Not submitted in the blog | ||
| 39 | Magi | Not submitted in the blog | ||
| 40 | Keith Williams | Not submitted in the blog | ||
| 41 | Jamie Ding | Not submitted in the blog | ||
| 42 | Lakshmi Prakash | Not submitted in the blog | ||