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Without wishing to give too much away would I be right in saying that the words "appropriate style" in the preamble merely indicate conversion of the thematic words in the final grid by means of an 8 letter word beginning and ending in the same letter.
Otherwise I can't see much connection between the thematic words except for two of them - unless I've missed the point completely.

If you have the name of the game, look at a picture of what the game is played on, and connect that to clue numbers

Each of the thematic words may be preceded by one of two relevant words (as far as BRB is concerned anyway), and I assume that the words should be written as determined by the relevant preceding word.

Thanks - got it in the end!

Interesting choice with 30, unless I've got the answer wrong! I've looked at several pictures and it appears to be the only one where the number disagrees with the preceding word as pointed out by Cockie above. Because of the theme, I've gone with the number, also it would require the letter in the third column of last but one row to be in both sets. Thoughts?

Good call. The matching entry in Chambers should have pointed you in a cardinal direction...

Isn't confirmation of correct entries given by "definition and letter mixture" from clue pairs?

I agree with Ginge. I thought the answer was the one you are hinting at and the wrong one began with a T.

It was the mixture in 25 beginning with ‘at’

Definition in 26 touches

Or am I wrong?

You are correct, but Chambers confirms that it agrees with the theme, so the clash which grayfriar suggested does not exist.

Thank you all, I had made two mistakes...
I had tats, as in "tit-for" for the head gear, not noticing a rather more obvious solution a few letters away!
That made getting the second word more difficult and the only word I could extract from a jumble in 25 & 26 was rats and I couldn't work out how to get them to go the right colour!