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Thanks from me too drxx, a really challenging puzzle. I'm not sure about the end game but really enjoyed the solve...huge admiration for the Badger!

Thanks, muraria - another great commendation from you (we're an appreciative little bunch so far... hopefully the word will spread).

A brilliant construction, but the great majority of the 'stream of consciousness' clues wouldn't have been acceptable in a Listener puzzle - when the setter says that 'Punctuation may mislead', they ain't joking!

If the setter had abandoned the extra letter gimmick (far more trouble than it was worth), the clues could easily have been made sound, and the puzzle as a whole would indeed have been a more than worthy Listener candidate.

But that's just my opinion...

Yes, spoffy, the clues certainly stretched the bounds of 'fiendishness' for me too, but I like the extra letter gimmick - I think the quote leads nicely on to the endgame.

I take your point, drxx, but to choose the 'extra letter in definition' gimmick for every clue, where each extra letter is fixed and there are answers as short as one or two letters, is surely what Sir Humphrey Appleby would have called 'a courageous decision'.

I don't generally like the gimmick, but if the setter wanted to stick with the message idea, then 'wordplay delivers an extra letter' would have lent itself perfectly to the purpose. The 'interesting' clue at h1, for instance, could have become 'Drug the Badger (1)', and a4, 'Short book the czar suppresses (2)'.

I like your alternatives, spoffy (I think this Badger is a particularly cruel one}.

I've just seen the solution to this crossword.

Apparently the instruction:

Squares with WHITE or BLACK letters contain pieces of the respective colour.

Meant answers beginning with the letters B,L,A,C,K were black
pieces and those starting with the letters W,H,I,T,E were white pieces.

Hi krauton
Yes, I took that as the way to go from the preamble. Otherwise I think the puzzle would have been far too difficult.

I think the preamble could have made a tad clearer though...

I wish I'd spotted that possibility at the time. As it is, I did it the hard way - deciding what colour a piece had to be by the colour of the piece(s) it was able to capture (the ones involved in checkmate at either end being, necessarily, one colour or the other). Colours for pawns were easier to work out as they alone are one-directional.
Anyway, apologies for my misleading interpretation of the preamble - as I wrote at the time, ''...well, that's what I think it means, krauton''.

That's odd, I can't see the published solution on the Crossword Centre site - they've extended the submissions date.