Wednesday, January 23, 2013

...Um... Yeah, I've Got Five Minutes To Do A Post

I mentioned recently that I've been browsing a website called The Chess Variants Pages.

It's kind of an old, deadlink-riddled place, but as a huge nerd who loves chess and fairy chess, I've been having fun at it.

Two of my singular favorite things I've found there are Chess with Different Armies, created by the always imaginative and entertaining Ralph Betza (an inactive but ranked chess master) and Litrof Litrôf Litròf Litróf.

Chess with Different Armies uses Betza's assessments of piece value to allow chess players to use different pieces in chess setups from the traditional ones against the traditional pieces and each other without having unbalanced games. (Apparently, two of the teams are slightly too strong, but their unique nature and the fact that people haven't learned how to use them as well just yet makes the difference negligible unless you're playing against a computer, which doesn't need to "learn" the pieces to play well with them.)

Litróf is a chess-like game which uses Icehouse pieces (little translucent colored plastic pyramids) to construct your army at the beginning of a game. While I don't think Litróf is perfect or anything, it's a fantastic framework for a game, and that alone makes me want some Icehouse pieces or a reasonable substitute.

-Signing off.

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