Designed by: Uncredited
You probably don’t need us to tell you about chess – it’s been around for hundreds of years and even if you’ve never played it, you kinda know it: an 8 x 8 grid in which two players face off against each other, moving pieces, taking pieces, and ultimately check-mating (putting into check with no possible escape) their opponent’s king.
But GNG is about new games in the main, and we’ve added chess here for the same reason we’ve added games such as Monopoly (although we do not disdain chess, I hasten to add); to hopefully steer fans of chess to similar types of games.
One such possibility is the much-shorter battle of The Duke: just as with chess, pieces move randomly on a grid, but they also flip over after moving, taking on new capacities. You can use what you have on the board already, or add new pieces from a bag.
If the purity of chess is what appeals (because there is some randomness in The Duke) then you might enjoy Tak or Hive, which are all about strategy and eliminate chance.
Both The Duke and Hive are two-player games, but there are others that take that kind of abstract battle into the land of multiplayer. Kids and adults alike have a tactical challenge in the deceptively feisty Hey That’s My Fish. You might enjoy Tigris and Euphrates, which balances a degree of chance with rich and very feisty battle across a valley of two rivers. Or have a quick browse of the Try This section on the left, where the abstract challenge is combined with other elements such as push-your-luck and set-collecting…
The game is an exercise in Take That. There is practically nothing else!
Possibly high. The faster you play, the more plausible it is you'll lose.
High. You have 18 potential moves at the start, and that's only going to get bigger - until you start losing pieces, anyway.
People have been playing it again for centuries.
Sam says
I am so immersed in newer games that I rarely - if ever - sit down and play chess, although I have fond memories of doing so twenty or so years ago. It's rightly regarded as a classic for many reasons, with a library of interesting writing about it - and unusual in that play-time will most likely go up rather than down the more you play it! However it's no criticism to point out that some of the games mentioned above bring other things to the table.