The Antithesis of a Modern Boardgame

At first glance, this game gives a very contradictory impression. 

The board is abstract, consisting of eight times eight squares. Half of the squares are black but as far as I can tell this has no impact on the gameplay and is just confusing. Perhaps the board is meant to represent the German fractured political map? The pieces on the other hand are the opposite - crude miniatures that remind more of the vulgar New World trash games that are popular among teenage boys.

Moving on to the setup, this is a cumbersome activity as thirty-two pieces have to be positioned on specific squares before you can start playing. Word has reached me about an Asian chess version called Go, where all pieces start off the board with no setup time at all. The designers of chess should have learned from this example. 

The gameplay itself is fairly simple. Take turns to move one piece to one square, discard any piece on the square you move to, and end when one player's King piece cannot avoid being discarded. As you can tell from this, chess represents everything that modern European boardgames have abandoned decades ago. 

First, the pieces are terribly unbalanced. The Pawn may only move one square at the time and only forward, the Bishop may only move diagonally while the Rook may only move orthogonally, and do not get me started on the Knight's complex movement rule. But stronger than all of them is the Queen, which may move both diagonally and orthogonally. Why anyone would ever choose to move another piece than the Queen is beyond me. 

Second, chess suffers from a severe runaway leader problem where it is very difficult to recover from initial piece losses. Some argue that there is a catchup mechanism in the rule of Pawn promotion, allowing a pawn which reach the last row to be exchanged for any other piece, but good luck getting this weak piece all the way there. 

Third, there is a distinct lack of progress and arc in the game. You are supposed to be a ruler of a kingdom with a strong army but neither of them improve during the game. Your kingdom will produce no resources, your military will not innovate at all and your soldiers will earn zero experience points. The only "upgrade" is the aforementioned Pawn promotion but really, a pawn deserting from the battlefield should not be promoted but rather executed.

Fourth, there is a disturbing disconnection between gameplay and theme. The idea that the Queen is stronger than the King is preposterous and the rule that a simple peasant can defeat a mounted knight by merely moving to its square proves that the designers are either blatantly ignorant of military theory or secretly supportive of subversive thoughts. 

Why not let the encounters be determined by dice or cards instead? Imagine if chess would have captured the noble one-on-one duels of the battlefield where heroes are born. What an epic feeling we would have got. What a lost opportunity we got instead. 

This leads us to the fifth problem, namely that this lack of healthy randomness makes chess prone to analysis paralysis. Many are the men in the bloom of their youth that I have seen pondering in vain at the chess board. And who can blame them? 16 pieces to choose from, each with several options which are difficult to predict anyway due to the constantly changing game state. A basic rule of boardgames is to provide the players with few but meaningful decisions. I regret to say that chess fails utterly in all those respects and I seriously fear for our youngsters' health if they spend too much time staring at a checkered board instead of seeking outdoor leisures. 

Each of those problems is in itself enough to break a game and then I haven't even mentioned the player elimination, the "take that" mechanic and the lack of solo versions. 

I've bought a couple of copies over the years and to my horror the components drastically varied in size, shape and quality between them. It is really suspicious, my guess is that either the manufacturer has to fight with some of the most severe quality control issues in history or the publisher has been the victim of one of the biggest counterfeit campaigns I have witnessed yet.

My final verdict is that chess is an expression of the prevalent cult of the new, doomed to be gone from the hotlist and forgotten by everybody within a decade or two.

I failed to mention the two tacked on rule fixes. Obviously these were added by the designer after the fact once certain strategies were discovered to be completely broken. Each rule fix is clumsy and overbearing, simply adding unnecessary complexity to the game with little benefit.

a) "Castling" - the ability the move 2 pieces at once, which breaks the major design feature of the game. Namely, "one move - one piece".

b) capturing "En Passant" - when a pawn can capture on a square that an enemy pawn has already skipped over. What? The pawn captures air? And in only certain special circumstances? This subtle rule is so unwieldy, it is still misunderstood by 80% of all players. Do you think changing "En Passant" to "Backstab" would make the rule more intuitive? It seems a good fit to me, given the inherent traitorous nature of peasants.

In my opinion, the fact that these rules were added indicates inadequate playtesting before release. Or perhaps the lack of a blind playtest.

Enough with the hack job rules! When the rules get this far outside of the originally intended design, it's time for a second edition. Get with it, publishers!

P.S. on a helpful note: if a 2nd edition is in the works, ensure that us 1st edition customers also have the option to purchase a 2nd edition upgrade kit, rather than having to buy the game all over again.

didn t read everything, too long. but reg the first paragraph, where you say the half black has no impact on the gameplay, i was wondering the same, until recently, where i read something from the Silman's endgame book : to get an indirect opposition by your king against opponent, you have to describe a rectangle which has all the angles at same colour. yep sorry for my english, i am french. Thus, btw, i read the last part of your novel above too. En passant means a lot to me, as a french guy :d