Match of the Century

Match of the Century is a curious case of a game about a game – specifically chess, as this head to head sees one player represent Bobby Fischer, and the other Boris Spassky, as the Grandmasters take each other on in a recreation of the 1972 world championship.

However, you don’t need to be a Grandmaster to play Match of the Century – in fact, you don’t actually need to know how to play chess at all. This game is what is commonly referred to as a ‘lane battler’ where your cards go up against your opponent’s cards in a series of ‘lanes’ – on the board – and winning a majority of the lanes wins you the round. The basic mechanics of play are simple: you both take turns playing a card, with the caveat that when the starting player plays into a specific lane, your reply must go into the same lane (see pictures).

Each card has a strength of between zero and five. Why zero? You can, and may well, choose to lose certain lanes, because whilst the winner takes a step closer to taking the round, the loser will get to activate the special power on their card, and it’s this decision-making space that makes the game come to life. We can’t list all the powers here, but in summary they manipulate elements of the basic in your favour. They might increase your mental strength (which determines hand size at the start of a round) or decrease your opponent’s. They might give you extra pawns – which can be played along with a card to increase its strength – or manipulate the result of the round by negating the result of this particular lane. Meanwhile, the winner of the lane moves their marker towards them on the Advantage track, showing that they are currently winning the round. When all five lanes have been resolved – or sooner, if it’s clear there is already a winner – whomever has the advantage marker on their side of the board wins that round.

Whomever wins the round moves their King piece along a score-track, and players swap between playing white and black for the next round – a matter of flipping all your cards from one way up to the other. Looking ahead and seeing what cards you’ll potentially have in the next round it also a key part of the strategy – and so is managing your deck of cards, as you may optionally discard cards you don’t like before drawing a new hand. When you run out of your draw pile, your discarded cards get shuffled into a draw pile again – but each time you do so, your mental strength is sapped and your hand size possibly affected. When your mental strength gets very low (or high), the advantage marker will start on your opponent’s side of the advantage track (or your side, if your mental strength is high) and give someone a head-start.

The first player to get their king to the middle of the score-track wins the game – and is crowned world champion!