As far as Inquisitors go, this puzzle by a compiler I have never come across before was relatively easy.
Many of the clues were of a standard that would not be out of place in a standard newspaper puzzle.
The eleven clues that required some work were the ones where the wordplay included an extra letter. Once you had these the rest was pretty straightforward.
A nice puzzle for someone new to barred puzzles howver.
Those eleven clues, and the letter that was revealed:-
12ac B ALOE – hidden in “colossAL OBEche”
14ac A ARUM – A-RA(U)M
18ac D DELHI – (<=LED)HID
32ac F ISLE – (life’s)*
1dn O SYBIL – (<=I(B(o)YS)-L
7dn R HAUTEUR – H.R.-AUTEUR
9dn A HEREIN – (hernia E)*
11dn T CACAOS – (Ca. coast)*
23dn O SMILES – (mole is)*-S
28dn W ICILY – i.c.-WILY
29dn N TYING – (clare)T-(Ginny)*
This gave the “word sum” BAD FOR A TOWN, which appears in rows 5-8 of the completed puzzle.
Read as a crossword clue, this could either indicate BATH (BAD often starts the name of German spa towns) or FARO ((for a)*), the town (and airport) in Portugal that many visitors to the Algarve would recognise.
Given that the title of the crossword is “Game of Chance” and FARO is also a card game, it is obvious that that is what the setter wants us to assume is the relevant town. We can therefore assume that the 5972 in the blurb relates to thel letters of FARO
So we have a word sum where we know four of the numbers
B 9 D +
5 2 7 +
9 =
T 2 W N
Simple logic then kicks in – the only number that D can equal is 8, so N is 4, therefore W is 3, B has to be 6 and T = 1
There are actually 24 different sets of digits which solve the word sum (B and F are interchangeable as are D and R, so 6 really distinct solutions). The only one with a word which is a solution for 5972 is the Faro one.