Listener No 4864 Board of Trade by Deuce

Deuce gives us a number of instructions in eight lines of preamble.

We have to remove extra words from five across clues and ‘the first letter of each … must replace the grid entry corresponding to the word’s position in its clue.’ We must remove non-word strings of consecutive letters. These will give us jumbled thematic properties of ‘the entry’s checked cells’. We must decipher a message from corrected misprints in down clues, that will tell us what happens next and there is some highlighting to do and an ‘arrival point’ to identify.

Quite a challenge; I reach for my G & T. Ah, does Deuce retain his oenophile status? Of course he does. ‘Ivy and gin stirred with old dye (6)’ It sounds pretty unpalatable but “Cheers” anyway, Deuce. We extract the VYAN from the clue and see INDIGO. Can VYAN be the colour or the service NAVY? We had wondered what that ‘regent’ was doing in the clue above that gave LECTOR, ‘Lyon’s the Catholic regent or bible reader (6)’ An anagram of GREEN – so we need six more colours from those letter strings. ‘Rash king Nero amazed god (7) gives us KRISHNA, with NGNERO to unjumble – ORANGE. LOWLY E(ton) gives us YELLOW, BROWN comes from (l)OW-BORN, RED from (Gran)DER and finally SKY from (won)KYS(alto). Eight colours, but thematic properties of what?

We’ve spotted that BUMPER CAR and GOLD CARD share an extra CAR, and that HATE MAIL and HOWS THAT share a HAT. One of the Dash team had recognised the theme by now (with the help of the title) but the ex-Numpty didn’t play this ‘board game’ with a car or a hat and was still mystified. It needed those five extra words (LEVIES, OSCARS, PLAIN, OPIATE and NOCTURNAL and the relevant manipulation of BUMPER, BLURRY, CHELSEA, APACHES, and EMBOLY to reveal MONOPOLY in the rising diagonal. Penny drops but what happens next? What a lot of material Deuce has managed to incorporate with his fine and relatively gentle clues.

THE CAR ROLLS NINE we are told so that car has to move nine cells on, but we are instructed not to show the result of that, so we leave the car where it was and hunt for the arrival point and there is the ELEC CO to highlight in column 4. My small grandson is staying with me for Easter and by chance has his mini travelling set of Monopoly with him. A quick check tells us that one pays four or ten times the number shaken, depending on whether the owner of the Electric Company owns one or two companies. Obviously we can’t highlight cell 90 (tht explains the ‘might’ in the preamble) so we highlight cell 36. We weren’t told to colour the board or draw the car, but who could resist? What a fine crossword, Deuce!