Hardest conundrums

[Johnny Canuck]

Simply put, what do you consider to be the hardest conundrums of the series, the year, all time, etc.? IMO the hardest one in Series 64 so far is MEGALITRE, although you never know what could be coming up in the finals.

[Malcolm James]

It depends what you mean by the hardest conundrum. Any conundrum is hard, if not impossible if you don't know the word. For example, how many people realised the conundrum on 26th May, LOADSPACE was a word? At best, in such a case a contestant might spot it, dismiss it as a non-word, but give it a go after 27 seconds when they can't find anything else. This is presumably what Adam did, but made the wrong guess of SPACELOAD. The best ones are words which everyone knows, but which are cunningly disguised. One of the best known examples is OVERSPADE for EAVESDROP, which was in the final of the CoC some years ago, where pretty well no-one, including two of the best players to grace our screens, had any idea.

[Charlie Reams]

Any conundrum is hard, if not impossible if you don't know the word.

Well yes, but that's one of the things you're meant to be weighing up.

One of the best known examples is OVERSPADE for EAVESDROP, which was in the final of the CoC some years ago, where pretty well no-one, including two of the best players to grace our screens, had any idea.

Agreed. I much preferred the days of common-but-difficult words rather than the conspicuous apto-centric dance of recent finals.

[Edward McCullagh]

MEGALITRE

[Innis Carson]

Gotta be MEGALITRE, not only do the letters give almost nothing away, but you'd very possibly dismiss the word even if you did think of it.

[Ryan Taylor]

I thought HORSEMEAT was pretty tough but IIRC there were actually quite a few hands up in the audience (maybe duds) and it was solved by audience member. I think this has a few false endings to throw people off like -SOME -MATE -METER etc.

[Johnny Canuck]

I think false endings are always hard, especially -ING ones. There's always such a strong intuition that it'll be a verb ending in -ING. I recall that one time in Series 54, there was a conundrum containing ING in the scramble. No-one anywhere got it. It ended up being SOMETHING.

On that note, has anyone noticed there have been a ridiculously low amount of -INGs this series? They used to show up at least once every few days, IIRC.

[Adam Gillard]

I thought HORSEMEAT was pretty tough but IIRC there were actually quite a few hands up in the audience (maybe duds) and it was solved by audience member. I think this has a few false endings to throw people off like -SOME -MATE -METER etc.

I was there for this recording. In the first instance there was only one lady who actually solved it; before her there were at least 2 incorrect guesses; I remember one of them was ATMOSPHERE . Then they re-shot it and loads of people put their hands up. I was nowhere near solving it.

[Josh Hurst]

I thought HORSEMEAT was pretty tough but IIRC there were actually quite a few hands up in the audience (maybe duds) and it was solved by audience member. I think this has a few false endings to throw people off like -SOME -MATE -METER etc.

I was there for this recording. In the first instance there was only one lady who actually solved it; before her there were at least 2 incorrect guesses; I remember one of them was ATMOSPHERE . Then they re-shot it and loads of people put their hands up. I was nowhere near solving it.

I thought this was a real toughie too. I remember thinking at the time that it was probably a toss-up between EARTHSOME and HEARTSOME, both of which seemed plausible to me. It was the first conundrum that came into my head anyway when I saw this topic of "Hardest conundrums" for this series.

[Steve Balog]

Yea, I really'd like to see the return of known words that can be very hard to unscramble because of all kinds of red herring stems and letter patterns, rather than "hey here's a word only Apetrous users know by Rote memorisation and no one knows the meaning of". I like EAVESDROP, (and as I mentioned recently in another thread), GANDISE-- I mean, DISENGAGE, etc. a LOT more than some word that I just go uhhhhhh ok whatever when I see.

I mean, there's plenty of words out there that can be used like this, with false stems that can confuse but are common words. Maybe, off the top of my head (from recent games/conundrums), DISMANTLE, NIGHTMARE (an awesome scramble can be "HATINGREM" for that), etc. More well-known compound words would also be great for harder words, maybe SIDESWIPE, SCAPEGOAT, ALONGSIDE, or HORSESHIT (ok, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea).

Enough with the types of crap that was in the last series's final. And enough with words that were added to the dictionary not long at all ago like MEGALITRE.

[Andy McGurn]

i thought PETROLEUM was tough. lucky for me that it was.

[Thomas Carey]

What about HOMEBUYER?