Chess

Yeah, you though I was joking yesterday, didn't you? Yeah you did.

After looking up the ridiculously fake-sounding names for opening chess moves, I delved a little further and started reading about the history of chess. Fascinating stuff. Were you aware that players new to the games of chess were called "rookies"? Yeah, because the rook is traditionally the last piece to be moved into play, just like the newest player. Eventually, the phrase migrated into other sports and games. Also, did you know that after the first move, there are 400 piece-position possibilities, but after the second, there are over 72 thousand? The math on that doesn't seem right, but it is. After three moves, there are over 9 million possibilities, and after four there are 288 billion. The number of electrons in the universe is theorized to be about 10^79, while the number of possible games on a chessboard is about 10^120, or in layman's terms, a whole lot.

Okay, these are pretty cool. Everybody knows about the six standard pieces, but there are in fact a good number of "fairy pieces" that didn't make it into the final cut. As gay as they sound, there are some pretty kick-ass moves you didn't even know existed. For instance, the zebra is a [3,2] jumper. That means it works like a knight (a [2,1] jumper) who can move two spaces then one space perpendicular. Except it can move three spaces, then two. Awesome. Equally excellent is the concept of knighted pieces, standard pieces with the additional power to move like a knight. A knighted queen can essentially win the game single-handedly (a knighted queen is also called a superqueen or an Amazon). Also wicked cool is the Grasshopper, a piece that can move like a queen but jumps over its victims to capture, à la checkers.

Chess variants are games played with standard pieces but different rules or board setups. A perennial favorite is Transcendental Chess, where the first rank of each player is randomized to ensure something-or-other. Also, Pawn's Game, where Black has standard setup, White has no queen, but eight extra pawns. Ummm, let's see... Lord Loss Chess, where there are five boards and a player can choose to remain on one board or move to another (You can probably attack from across boards, which would be awesome), Andernach Chess, where a capture results in a color change rather than a death (presumably a player could have two queens, four knights and four bishops while the other side has all the pawns), and Progressive Chess, where White makes one move, Black makes two, White makes three and so on. Another good one is Upside-Down Chess, where you're playing the other side of the board. As such, the pawns only have one space to move to, but once they do, you can promote them to queens. You'd have nine queens, if I understand the rules correctly. It would be a massacre of epic proportions. But it would be nothing compared to Kung-Fu Chess. This is a variant in which there are no turns; players can move their pieces whenever they want. Games must be over in mere minutes (as opposed to the longest game ever played, a whopping 269-move monster played in 1989. It lasted for 20 hours. For comparison, a fifty-move rule has been in effect for most major tournaments since the early Nineties and most games don't even get that far). To combine fairy pieces with one of these variants would probably mean the end of time and space as we know it; and besides, require the fortitude of a demigod.

To end with, I'll tell you of a sport my high-school art teacher first brought to my attention; a little sport called chess boxing. The game begins with a four-minute round of speed chess (the one with the timers) followed by two minutes of boxing. There are eleven rounds total and games can be won by checkmate or knockout. I get exhausted just thinking about it.