Polygon 15 August

Polygon puzzle

Using the given letters no more than once, make as many words as possible of three or more letters, always including the central letter. Capitalised words, plurals, conjugated verbs (past tense etc), adverbs ending in LY, comparatives and superlatives are disallowed.

How you rate: 10 words, average; 13, good; 16, very good; 20, excellent.

Source: The Times

Click here for rules and tips on how to play Polygon

Answers on the continuation page.

act, actual, aft, calf, cat, caul, fact,  facula, fat, fatal, fault, flat, lac, lat, taal, tala, talc, tau, tufa

factual is the word using all the letters

I got 15 of these, Susan, including factual. I missed facula, lat, taal and tufa.  I guessed tala but don’t know it as a word, so that shouldn’t count.

Glad you are still enjoying Sudoku, and Wayne Gould’s puzzles. His are excellent, many of the imitators do not have unique solutions so are not as satisfying. I think one reason many people don’t investigate sudokus is that they appear to be about maths, but they are not — as you astutely say, they are about pattern recognition. I agree that the dentist’s waiting room is the ideal place to do a puzzle to calm you down, I have lost count of the number of times I have sat in such places and resorted to a sudoku to stay sane! If you go to the (london) Times website they have three sudokus a day, a "killer" (my favourite type) and two "plains": a relatively easy one and a relatively hard one. They get harder during the week. I think you can download them; the two plain ones are Wayne’s puzzles, so there is another source for you.