The Foxer

When a foxer is still at large 32 hours after release it often becomes cocky. Public houses may be visited, steamrollers borrowed, unsuspecting milkmaids and nature poets goosed. Last week's long-lived collage was too sly for grandstanding but not sly enough to elude that preternaturally prehensile creature, the eeldvark.

Last week's theme: Sid Meier (defoxed by eeldvark)

a SimGolf (AFKAMC)
b NATO Commander (Shiloh)
c Antietam! (unsolved)
d Civ (phuzz)
e Solo Flight (foop)
f Hellcat Ace (Stugle)
g Meier (AFKAMC)
h Railroads! (unsolved)
i Maryland (AFKAMC)
j F-15 Strike Eagle (Stugle)
k CPU Bach (phlebas)
l Acrojet or Covert Action (phlebas, mrpier, Vurogj)

* * * *

Good foxer setters copy, great ones Ram-raid. Last Friday afternoon I asked Roman to come up with a new foxer format. He disappeared into the TV room for an hour and emerged brandishing the very first 'Hive Foxer'!

If you're a fan of the BBC quiz show Hive Minds you'll know roughly what to do. The 127-cell honeycomb at the foot of this post is a fancy form of wordsearch in which every cell is used, and words can curl and zigzag but never overlap. Here's a fragment of a solved one with a Doom theme  - solution words include MARINE (e3,d3,d2,e2,d1,e1) and INFERNO (a7,b8,c9,d9,e9,f10,g11)

Roman respects the defoxing community far too much to disclose themes prior to defoxing, but he is prepared to tell you how many words you're looking for. The perfectly interlocking solution to today's hive foxer is made up of 18 words.