Fairy Chess. Seriously.
I don’t know how I got to thinking about top-level international chess tournaments, but I did. And I’ve got an idea to improve them.
From a design standpoint, chess is only a mediocre game. It deserves points for being one of the best board games available for over a thousand years, but that’s largely because there weren’t many games at all, much less good ones, before 1950. Increasing leisure time made games a viable business, and a few landmark games like Monopoly and Risk proved there was room beside the ancient giants: chess, Parcheesi, rummy/mah jong, nine men’s morris, and more.
Professional attention has produced a rich variety of board games, often by striking off into new territory, but usually by refining existing concepts. 221B Baker Street, for example, improved on Clue by eliminating the pointless dead time spent walking between rooms and sticking strictly to the process of reasoning out the solution. Pente improved on tic-tac-toe by extending the board and by adding a rule for captures, deepening strategic depth; optimal play is no longer so easy that every ten-year-old can play a perfect game. Settlers of Catan captures the essence of Monopoly trading while removing any chance for a reluctant trader to create a game-wide stalemate.
It is in this improved sense of game design that chess begins to look…well, clumsy. It’s not a badgame; it has strategic depth, at least. Unfortunately, climbing the learning curve to the point where you can appreciate that depth is a long painful process. The rules for moving the pieces are arbitrary and difficult to learn. The two-space pawn move, specifics of castling, and capturing en passant are particularly opaque, and occasionally cause even experienced players trouble. The distinction between capturing the king and checkmate is silly. Worse, the arbitrary and unintuitive nature of the rules creates a vast gulf between knowing how to play and knowing how to play well.
Numerous variations on chess, collectively called “fairy chess,” have appeared over the ages, introducing new pieces, changing the board’s size or shape, or even more creative ideas. One intriguing version—missile chess—gives every piece the ability to capture once in the game to capture a piece, without moving from its current space, any piece it could capture in the normal fashion. (If you’d like to try this, keep track of each piece’s “missile” by placing a checker underneath it until fired.)
Chess has no inherent design advantage to fairy chess, or to related games like Chinese chess and shogi; often it is technically inferior to its variations. Proper chess persists only because so many people already play it. It’s easier to find a chess opponent than to find someone willing to play, say, Smess, a version of fairy chess where movement is governed by arrows on the spaces of the board, rather than the pieces’ inherent ability. The learning curve is steep, but you can find innumerable books to help you past that curve; no such library exists for even popular games like Scrabble and Diplomacy, and no library exists at all for games which aren’t household names. Similarly arcane games are quickly forgotten, but chess persists because a lot of people are already committed to chess. Chess is the Windows OS of the game world.
Chess is a game of complete information, that is, all players know at all times the complete state of affairs in the game. No chance elements like cards or dice exist to surprise the players, nor do players hide game elements from one another, as they do in poker. In theory, one could produce a complete analysis of chess by brute force, cataloguing every possible position and every possible move. In practice, this is impossible because of the sheer quantity of positions to examine. For amateur play, this is not a problem, as no player could possibly perform a meaningful fraction of the necessary analysis of a given position.
For professional play, however, this is a problem. World-class play depends heavily, not on native talent, but on an encyclopedic knowledge of every variation of the first fifteen or twenty moves, and a wide knowledge of variations beyond that. Given that most games end within thirty or forty moves, and that games that end in a victory (instead of a draw) are usually determined by an early mistake, we are not so much watching talented chess players as watching very large memories at work, demonstrating the extent of their knowledge of a huge algorithm. A complete analysis is still out of our reach, but a team of experts, accompanied by some powerful computers, can produce a meaningful portion of one that no player, not even the world champions, could produce on their own. When the stakes are high enough, as they were in the celebrated Fischer-Spassky tournament in Reykjavik, or in the more recent Kasparov-Big Blue showdown, the competition is at least partially removed from the hands of the players themselves, and instead invested in a whole team of experts. These teams don’t just operate between games; at times, games will be halted overnight, and these teams will work out winning strategies for their champion while the game is still in progress. In these cases, we’re not even watching the players any more; we’re watching the pure results of an algorithm reaching a fixed conclusion. Watching this kind of chess is no more interesting than watching a tic-tac-toe tournament, and for much the same reason.
So here’s where my suggestion comes in. If we really want to see chess talent, as opposed to rote knowledge, in action, tournament chess must be made less predictable. The chess game itself must remain one of complete information, or the whole appeal of a contest of pure intellect is lost. But the tournament itself could be made unpredictable, by employing fairy chess. Before every world match, or even before each game in the match, establish a variation on the basic chess rules, and require the players to use that variation. All the rote memorization of openings would be useless; so, too, computer analysis, which could never be generated in time; the adaptivity which is the essence of true gaming skill (and, indeed, of intelligence generally) would come to the fore.