Perspectives

By Burt Hochberg

All Work and No Play Makes Chess a Dull Game

Chess can be very hard work if we take it seriously. All that
opening analysis, all that endgame theory, all those current games
to keep up with, all that money spent on books. The stress, the
angst, the pain. You know what I mean. If we put as much time
and effort into other studies as we put into chess, we'd all speak
eight languages and have a lock on the unified field theory.

Chess can be fun, too, of course. When we're not boning up for the
next tournament or plotting how to get even with our brother-in-
law the next time, we relax with blitz chess, or solve problems, or
play mind-jangling chess variants. For those so inclined, there are
thousands of chess variants to explore, most of which are described
in David Pritchard's great study, "The Encyclopedia of Chess
Variants."

In my job as senior editor of Games magazine, where I edit the
game-review section and the annual Buyer's Guide to Games, I
receive many commercial games chess variants. New ones come
out every year, god help us, and the very few good ones find their
way into the pages of Games magazine or the Buyer's Guide.
Curiously, though, I almost never see them mentioned in the chess
press. I would like to rectify that by telling you about three recent
arrivals that I think you should be interested in.

Bosworth (Out of the Box Publishing, $19.95, www.otb-
publishing.com, or 608 244-2468) takes its name from Bosworth
Field in England, where Richard III lost the decisive battle of the
War of the Roses (immortalized by a line from Shakespeare's play
that every chess player mutters at least once in every tournament
"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!").

In Bosworth, a board game for two, three, or four players, a deck
of 64 cards represents the pieces, 16 in each of four colors. The
board is a 6x6 grid with the four corner spaces unused. Each player
gets a set of 16 cards of one color, consisting of a king and a
queen, two rooks, bishops, and knights, and eight pawns. To begin,
each player lays out four pawns face up on his edge of the board
(his "field camp"). His remaining 12 cards are shuffled and stacked
face down. He draws four cards off the top to form a hand. The
other eight form a face-down reinforcement deck. Players then
simply play chess, except that there is no castling, en passant,
pawn promotion, or check. An attacked king that can't get out of
check is captured, and that player is out of the game. (If there are
only two players, the game is over.)

Here's the intriguing part. After you move or capture, you must fill
an empty space in your field camp, if there is one, with a card
chosen from your hand, then replenish your hand from your
reinforcement deck. Of course, the moment you place your king on
the board, your opponent knows where it is and can attack it. For
most of the game, you can avoid this, since you choose which card
from your hand to place in your field camp, and often you can
move without clearing a space in your field camp. But soon
enough you will have no choice but to bring your king into battle.
When that moment comes, who will be glad to see it, you or your
opponent?

Bosworth is a tense game of cat-and-mouse. The superimposed
extra layer of strategy makes it one of the most enjoyable
commercial chess variants we've seen.

Knightmare Chess (Steve Jackson Games, $14.95,
www.sjgames.com) is an English-language adaptation of the
French game Tempete sur l'Echiquier, by Pierre Clequin and
Bruno Faidutti. When Steve Jackson first published Knightmare
Chess in the U.S. last year, my review in Games magazine was
generally favorable about the game play, but I thought the art on
the cards was both hideous and inappropriate and the text almost
illegibly small. In Knightmare Chess 2, the text is much larger,
thank you very much, but the card art remains hideous and
inappropriate. Steve Jackson's company concentrates on fantasy
and horror role-playing games, where this sort of art belongs. In a
lighthearted chess variant played for laughs, these dark, gothic-
fantasy images, irrespective of their qualities as art, are completely
out of place. The original French cards are illustrated, properly,
with simple cartoons. Steve just doesn't get it.

But I enthusiastically endorse the game. From a master deck of 80
cards, each having a point value in one corner, players choose any
cards they like that add up to 150 points. (You can mix in the cards
from the original game, too, or buy blank cards to create your own
special effects.) Each player shuffles his own deck and draws a
hand of five cards, always replenishing to five cards from his own
deck after playing a card. The chessboard is set up as usual and the
game begins.

On a turn, a player may either move normally or play a card from
his hand. Each card tells you when it may be played, what effect it
has, and how long the effect lasts. This is the heart of the game.
Since anything can happen, and usually does, you never know
what to expect. It's like playing chess in some demented
otherworld.

Here are just a few of the simpler possibilities. Replace any bishop
with a knight of the same color. Your bishop can move through
other pieces. A capturing man assumes the powers of the man it
captured. The two kings swap positions, as long as neither is put in
check. The two queens swap positions. Pawns capture forward, the
way they move, instead of diagonally.

In addition, some pieces gain extraordinary powers (a knight, for
instance, can sometimes move a distance of three squares instead
of two) and can be revived to fight again if you have the right
cards. Some cards are in effect for only a single turn, but others
remain in effect until canceled by another card.

By the way, try not to run out of cards. Each played card is gone
forever, and when you have no more cards you're reduced to just
playing chess. If your opponent still has cards when that happens,
you could be plumb out of luck.

Global Chess (ABC Northwest, $59.95, www.globalchess.com, or
503 364-2107) is for players with a clear head and a taste for
adventure. This ingenious game manages to realize a three-
dimensional idea in two dimensions. Two boards, each of them
half a flattened globe, are joined by a set of gears that allows them
to be rotated in place. Anyone who's ever played circular chess
knows how hard it is to visualize the moves, and playing on two
circular boards is forget-about-it. The rotating boards in Global
Chess solve the problem very cleverly. Rotations don't change the
position but let you see where your pieces are going. Since pieces
move along unexpected paths (through the center of the "globe," as
it were), this is a crucial ability.

To say that Global Chess is full of surprises is a gross
understatement. Imagine your chagrin when your "safe" king is
goosed from behind by an enemy rook!

Copyright 1998 Burt Hochberg. All Rights Reserved.