Gamescafe.com
October, 1998
Burt Hochberg, Senior Editor
USA

Chess can be very hard work if we take it seriously. All that opening analysis, all that endgame theory, all those current games to keep up with, all that money spent on books. The stress, the angst, the pain. You know what I mean. If we put as much time and effort into other studies as we put into chess, we'd all speak eight languages and have a lock on the unified field theory.

Chess can be fun, too, of course. When we're not boning up for the next tournament or plotting how to get even with our brother-in-law the next time, we relax with blitz chess, or solve problems, or play mind-jangling chess variants. For those so inclined, there are thousands of chess variants to explore, most of which are described in David Pritchard's great study, The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants.

In my job as senior editor of Games magazine, where I edit the game-review section and the annual Buyer's Guide to Games, I receive many commercial games chess variants. New ones come out every year, god help us, and the very few good ones find their way into the pages of Games magazine or the Buyer's Guide. Curiously, though, I almost never see them mentioned in the chess press. I would like to rectify that by telling you about three recent arrivals that I think you should be interested in.

Bosworth (Out of the Box Publishing, $19.95, www.otb-games.com, or 608 244-2468) takes its name from Bosworth Field in England, where Richard III lost the decisive battle of the War of the Roses (immortalized by a line from Shakespeare's play that every chess player mutters at least once in every tournament, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!").

In Bosworth, a board game for two, three, or four players, a deck of 64 cards represents the pieces, 16 in each of four colors. The board is a 6x6 grid with the four corner spaces unused. Each player gets a set of 16 cards of one color, consisting of a king and a queen, two rooks, bishops, and knights, and eight pawns. To begin, each player lays out four pawns face up on his edge of the board (his "field camp"). His remaining 12 cards are shuffled and stacked face down. He draws four cards off the top to form a hand. The other eight form a face-down reinforcement deck. Players then simply play chess, except that there is no castling, en passant, pawn promotion, or check. An attacked king that can't get out of check is captured, and that player is out of the game. (If there are only two players, the game is over.)

Here's the intriguing part. After you move or capture, you must fill an empty space in your field camp, if there is one, with a card chosen from your hand, then replenish your hand from your reinforcement deck. Of course, the moment you place your king on the board, your opponent knows where it is and can attack it. For most of the game, you can avoid this, since you choose which card from your hand to place in your field camp, and often you can move without clearing a space in your field camp. But soon enough you will have no choice but to bring your king into battle. When that moment comes, who will be glad to see it, you or your opponent?

Bosworth is a tense game of cat-and-mouse. The superimposed extra layer of strategy makes it one of the most enjoyable commercial chess variants we've seen.

Back to Bosworth Reviews page