According to the conventional wisdom, there are two types of
chess players who like to play so-called chess variants (games of chess in
which the normal rules have been altered in some way)—those who are very good
at chess, like world champion Jose Raul Capablanca (who invented a chess
variant), and those who are not very good at chess, like me (who invented
several chess variants). There are thousands of chess variants, and most of
them are very bad. Some, however, are very good. Shogi, or Japanese Chess, is
an excellent game in its own right, and it is very different from Western Chess,
with its flat, pointed pieces which can be parachuted back onto the board if
they are captured. The pieces look like little boats or little arrowheads, and
although the sides are called black and white as in Western Chess, the pieces
are all the same color. You can tell which player has a piece by which way the
piece is pointing.
One of
my favorite chess variants is a game which is known by several different names—Neo-Chess,
Drop Chess, Mad Mate, Reinforcement Chess, Turnabout Chess, Schizo Chess, and
Chessgi. The game has been invented and re-invented several times, with the
earliest incarnation of the game appearing in 1827 and the latest (Neo-Chess) being
invented by Alex Randolph in 1972. It was supposedly re-invented under the name
of Chessgi in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s by a group of college students
who wanted to play Shogi but couldn’t find a Shogi set.
The
name Chessgi is the most descriptive of all the names that the game has gone
under. If you know the rules of Chess, the rules of Chessgi are simple. Chessgi
is played exactly like Chess with the addition of the following rules: (1) A
captured piece becomes the property of the player capturing it and may be
parachuted back onto the board in a subsequent move. (2) If a captured piece is
parachuted onto the board, no piece on the board can be moved. (3) A pawn
cannot be parachuted onto the back row where it cannot move. (4) If a piece
which has promoted from a pawn is captured, it does not lose its promoted rank.
Playing
the game is cumbersome. You need at least two sets so that a captured piece can
be replace it with a piece of the captor’s color before being parachuted back
onto the board. You need a flow chart to keep up with what’s been captured and
who has captured it. Neo-Chess, which is a proprietary game, solved the problem
by replacing the pieces with cylinders. On one end of the cylinders would be
the symbols for the pieces in one color and on the other end would be the
symbols for the pieces in the other color. When a piece was captured, the
captor could simply turn it over. Neo-Chess is no longer on the market, but you
can occasionally find a used set on ebay.
I don’t
know when I first became aware of Chessgi. I think it was shortly after I
joined The Knights of the Square Table (NOST), a now-defunct postal chess club.
When I read about the game in the pages of the NOST newsletter, I wanted to
play it, but I didn’t want to fool around with two chess sets and I had never heard of Neo-Chess. I had
already made myself a Shogi set, so I decided to make a Chessgi set.
I had
previously made a Shogi set using directions I found in a library book, so I
decided to make my Chessgi set exactly as I had made my first Shogi set. Cutting
out the little pointed pieces was easy. The hard part was figuring out how to
put the symbols on them. When I made my Shogi set, I used a stencil to put the
initials of the pieces on the wooden shapes, but I wanted real Chess symbols on
the Chessgi pieces. Having no Chess stencil and no artistic talent, I decided
to photocopy drawings of the pieces and glue them on the wooden arrowheads. I
had black symbols on one side and white symbols on the other so that the pieces
could be flipped over as in Neo-Chess, but I soon discovered that I only needed
one color because it was easy to distinguish the sides by the way the pieces
pointed. We’ve moved twice since I made that Chessgi set, and I have no idea
where it is.
Recently
I got in the mood to play some Chessgi, so I made another set. This time I used
a chess figurine stencil from Amazon.com to put the symbols on the pieces. Although
it wasn’t necessary, I put black symbols on one side of the pieces and red
symbols on the other. The set looks like this:
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Now if I can just find someone to play against.
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