Monthly Archives: November 2024

My favorite tabletop Chess variants

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Chess again, since I’m working on that Action Chess remake. Coincidentally, today someone in the BGG abstract strategy games forum asked (paraphrased):

What are your favorite chess variants, and why?

I took the time to write up a fairly lengthy response, and I’ll reproduce the bulk of it (including my recommendations) here.

Losing Chess

Back when I was playing a lot of chess ~20 years ago, (which was before I really thought of myself as any kind of game designer), I played a fair amount of Losing Chess. (I called it Suicide Chess at the time, but I now definitely prefer the name Losing Chess.) I wasn’t yet into “modern” board games, so the “why I liked it” was probably mostly because it felt like Chess but with a totally different objective. It’s also usually a lot shorter than a typical Chess game, so easier to fit more games into one session.

Terrace

Before I played a lot of Chess, a very influential Chess variant to me personally was Terrace. Why I like it: I think, for me personally, it was probably the precursor to the kinds of games talked about in this (the BGG Abstract Strategy Games) forum. It had incredibly simple rules, (at least in comparison to Chess, although on the more complex side for games in the forum). Only one type of piece, (and movement) but in 3 sizes. It was a chess board with a changed topology. (Topology that directly affects piece movement.) And it was playable up to 4-players! Everything about it just felt different, and all in very intentional and interesting ways. What’s more, at the time, (this was in the early 1990s), there was a paper newsletter that was publishing – among other things – variant rules for the game.

Shogi

Earlier this year I was playing a lot of Shogi. As someone who grew up playing Chess, it definitely feels like a Chess variant, but of course that’s obviously subjective. Why I like it: It’s got a slightly bigger board, but there are fewer pieces that move at a distance, so that feels “balanced” not to feel correspondingly more overwhelming. The captures becoming pieces you can “drop” on the board means games feel like they go a little faster than standard Chess (although that might be also quite subjective since my sample size is still quite low relative to Chess). Also, and this might again be my own subjective experience, it appears that Shogi is thought of a little more like a game system than Chess typically is. (Although the fact that we’re talking about Chess variants probably disproves this.) I guess my point is actually that there are well established rules for Shogi at different sizes, and it’s been fun for me to explore that aspect of it.

ChessXGo

In the last month all I want to play is my own game ChessXGo. Why I like it: IMO, ChessXGo replicates the feeling of the most exciting part of Shogi, when you have pieces “in hand” ready to drop on the board. (That’s kind of the whole early game.) It’s a game that feels like both games. And it clearly benefits the player to have played a lot of both games. You will be a better ChessXGo player if you’ve played a lot of Chess, but also if you’ve played a lot of Go. The game does this interesting thing where it morphs from feeling more like Chess to feeling more like Go, and if you play it only thinking about how to capture the King, you will probably lose, because your opponent has a better position for the second half. ChessXGo is why I’ve been thinking a lot about Chess variants again, even though it started as a Go variant. I’m quite happy to have designed a game that mashes up two of the best known and most beloved games of all time… and I’ve been thinking that this is probably my magnum opus.

Thrive

Since I’m talking about my own designs, I’d be remiss not to mention Thrive. I still think it’s a fine game after hundreds of plays. On the “lighter” side – certainly nowhere near the depth of chess – but it has the same bones. Why I like it: I think the whole “each piece is a grid that indicates its own movement relative to the board” idea (that I stole from both Onitama and The Duke) is super interesting, and Thrive is a distillation of that mechanic into a game that lets you focus on just that. (While also making it a variable that changes for each piece, which led to the game’s tagline: “Build your own chess piece with classic abstract strategy game-play, reinvented.”) Speaking of, I also recommend Onitama and The Duke – they are both also commercial Chess variants that are certainly worth playing.

ChessPlus and Paco Saco

If I remember correctly, I slightly prefer the rules of ChessPlus to Paco Saco, but I like them both. (They feel like different explorations of the same concept. The Paco Saco exploration is more interesting, but I think I liked ChessPlus as a game slightly more.) I think I like them both for the same reason. Why? Both allow you to land on other pieces and “combine” them into one stronger piece that moves like both pieces. This concept is certainly not new, of course, as it’s the motivation for a lot of the fairy Chess pieces, but the innovation with these is letting you change the combinations while the game is in progress. I own both of these commercial variants, and for me playing each of them feel quite different. I highly recommend both. (I also own a bunch of nicely produced fairy Chess pieces, although I’ve rarely played with them.)

Katarenga

One of the other forum posters, Russ, described a game called Essentia like this:

Another comes to mind: Essentia (published by nestorgames in 2010). Pieces move like standard chess pieces with standard checkmate goal, but all pieces are physically identical: a piece’s specific type of chess movement depends not on its piece type (since all pieces are identical) but on the type of square the piece currently occupies.

I didn’t know about Essentia before his post, but that description made me think he was talking about Katarenga, which I really love. Katarenga is one of my favorite Chess variants because it’s another example of changing where movement information is encoded. And as soon as you put the movement mechanics on the board instead of the pieces, it makes sense to make the board itself variable, which Katarenga does, so you’re not playing the same game every time. It’s worth going to the game’s website where you can find a bunch of variant rules.

Game Systems

One final note on Game Systems that was not part of my forum reply. I thought it likely I’d already talked on this blog about how much I love game systems, but I did a search just now and I didn’t find anything. I’ve certainly written about specific game systems I enjoy, (and I consider Chess to be one of them!), but I didn’t find anything about game systems more generally. I will have to remedy that someday.

current personal projects

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I’m always torn between a bunch of different personal projects. (I’m sure I’m not alone in this.) When looking at each project individually, it’s sometimes hard to see there’s any progress being made. I think games that have code involved are easier for me to see the progress as they progress.

This is almost an aside, but board game projects are more nebulous to me. I generally have a TODO list for all my projects, and work against the list. And with board games, sometimes the next item on the TODO is just… something super nebulous, like “make a prototype”. I have a lot of board game projects in that phase, actually. I didn’t list them below.

Each of these could absolutely get its own blog post, but since I’m writing so infrequently these days, I’ll probably never make the time to do that.

So without further ado, here are the personal projects I am currently more or less actively working on (in no particular order):

A new version of ActionChess Action Chess was my first game for iOS, and my first project of any kind using Xcode. It was my first real game release as well, although I did hardly anything other than push the publish button. (Only a few things that resembled marketing.) Anyway, I was quite sad when it fell out of the iOS App store, and shortly thereafter started a remake in Unity that never got that far. A few months back I was playing with a “cross platform template” (for Apple platforms), and decided to remake this again. Best guess for completion: 3-6 months.

A game in Godot with my friend August My friend August is a “real” game developer. (By which I mean his day job is for a company in the industry that makes actual games with actual budgets that people work on during office hours.) We have made a bunch of games together over the years, and were lamenting that we hadn’t collaborated in a while. This project is much bigger and more ambitious than anything we’ve made before. Best guess for release: 2-3 years.

A new version of Go-Tetris Since this game, my first digital game, was originally made in Flash (specifically in ActionScript 2.0), you can technically still play it, but you have to find & download the .swf, and then plug it into an old version of flash or an emulator like Ruffle. I’ve started a project to re-write it several times over the years, most notably a version in Unity where I renamed it Action Go and commissioned some artwork. I even showed that version at some events a bunch of years back, but never got it far enough along to give it a proper release. I’m re-using some of the assets in a new-ish project made with GateEngine, a game engine built in Swift that should let me build for macOS, Windows, and Linux desktops. I am a bit blocked on this project, and haven’t touched it in months, but still hope to get back to it sooner or later. Best guess for release: 6-months to a year, (at soonest).

A book of Go Boards and Go variants I am somewhat stalled on this project too, but really want to get back to it. Best guess for release: 1-year (But I probably would have said that a year ago, and I was more actively working on it back then. I’d like to start releasing “pages” much earlier than that. I think once I have 2 or 3 finished, they would make for good blog posts.)

Various board game designs At any given time there’s usually 1 or 2 games I’ve designed that I’m most excited about. Right now that’s either a Chess variant or Go variant (depending on how you look at it) that is basically playing Chess and Go at the same time. But there are 2 or 3 others also burning some extra brain CPU cycles. No thoughts on releasing any of those, (although I might do a “make 100” kickstarter for the Chess-&-Go project), mostly I just pitch my designs to publishers as the opportunity presents itself. (I tried to make more of a concerted effort to do that this year, and made very little headway, tbh. I’m not sure if I’ll continue that effort next year or not.)

Transitioning this blog I would like to combine this blog with my other, more personal blog. I rarely write over there, and lately I also rarely write anything here. I think part of the reason for the lack of content is basically just WordPress. I’m pretty sick of it, and in general think these sites should be static content which would be better in many ways. I have managed to port the contents of both blogs to markdown, and had some ambitions to use one of the static site generators built in Swift for this project, but after evaluating some of them (namely Ignite and then Publish), I didn’t love either of the options that were out there. (More recently, I also took a look at Genesis, which actually helped renew my interest in the project, but while I love the ideas behind it, it’s not really full-featured enough – or maybe mature enough – for me to use it just yet.) I have some experience with Jekyll, so that’s where I’m leaning right now. But I kind of hate the nuts and bolts of front-end development, and this project is stalled out in the phase of finding and modifying a template to look like either one of the existing blogs. (Or maybe something else that I don’t hate.)

boardgame.design I stood up this website, https://boardgame.design, in little more than a few hours one afternoon. It’s not really a project so much as a thing I am committed to updating – once a month or so – on an ongoing basis. It’s not much more than a local (Twin Cities, MN) board game design related event listing at the moment, although there are pages for some other local tabletop-related stuff as well. I’m quite proud of getting the domain name, but I have yet to hear anyone say they’re using the site for the event listing stuff, and I might still repurpose it. No idea what I would use it for, though I have some ideas, they all sound like work.