A Wicked Idea...

Recently, I had the chance to see the play Wicked during a trip to London.  Besides being a delightful and entertaining production in its own right, what makes it instantly engaging with the audience is its identification with the movie, The Wizard of Oz.  The basic premise of the play is to expand on the original movie that is so familiar to everyone, by daring to ask the question: “What if the Wicked Witch wasn’t so wicked after all?”

What makes Wicked work so well is that it doesn’t try to change the classic movie, but rather expands on what we already know.  As a result, we have a larger perspective from which to examine the world of Oz, its characters, and the timeline before and after the original film.  And, once you have seen the play, you can’t help but wonder how it influences your thinking when watching the original movie again.

In the world of board games, chess has always been the “timeless classic” against which others are compared. It combines the ideal mix of simplicity and complexity, a true match of skill which has been played throughout centuries and around the world.

It is no surprise, then, that many people have created chess variants, which take elements of chess, and try to change certain features.  The draw is that these games, unlike other generic board games, appeal to what we already know and love.  The key is to do this without changing too much (or it won’t seem like chess), and yet making the world which it creates bigger.

Sovereign Chess came out of a simple question I asked after playing hundreds of games of traditional chess: 

What if there were more armies than just black and white? 

Of course, such variants have been created with three or four colors, but requiring three or four players as a result.  Since I wanted a world with a variety of colors--but with only two players--the way to manage the movement was by creating squares which, when occupied, controlled the pieces of that color.

With that simple question and answer, the world of Sovereign Chess began to create itself.  The size of the board, the location of pieces, how to adapt movement to suit the board, and so on.  My challenge, though, was to try to preserve as much of traditional chess as possible.  No new pieces, minimal changes to movement, and similarity in rules were the result. 

In this vein, I feel the biggest compliment I get about Sovereign Chess is not when someone says it “looks cool”, or it is “fun to play”, but rather when they say:

“This is just like the chess I played as a kid, but at a whole new level.”

In the next few blog posts, I am going to explain the many subtleties of Sovereign Chess, and explore some of the strategies, situations, and curiosities that have arisen among those who have played.

Thanks for reading about this game, and I hope you enjoy the new world which you are about to explore.

This series continues with "Using a Pie to Solve a Classic Gaming Question" >>