Books with Pictures: Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants

With most of my book notes--such as this one--the title goes to the Amazon page for it--behold: The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants. In this case, however, it's not going to get you very far. The book is relatively difficult to get ahold of; in fact, I was haunting all the used book sites trying to track this thing down--it came out three years ago via a sub-tiny publisher that existed only to publish this book and no longer exists. Finally, I decided to check eBay, and discovered that Ancient Chess--one of my favorite eBay sellers--had a bunch of copies for thirty bucks including shipping.

So that was fun.

It came in the mail earlier today, and while I might have further thoughts later I thought I'd contribute a little bit now.

Pritchard (who died in 2005) was the foremost authority on regional, historic, fictional, proprietary, and all other forms of chess. It may well be that he knew more about chess variations than anybody has known anything about anything. He wrote a few books on the subject, and this is his magnum opus. It expands his 1995 Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, which is also very hard to find. The Classified Encyclopedia has 200 extra variants, bringing the total to north of 1600. It is organized into eight parts, and a total of 38 sections with varying numbers of sub-sections, each of which has between one and umpteen chess variants. Part three, for example, is devoted to variants with "boards of other kinds;" one section is on hexagonally-tiled boards, another with other planar boards, "cylindrical, toroidal, and spherical boards," boards in multiple dimensions...there are, incidentally, multiple six-dimensional versions of chess. My favorite game description in this section, though, is this:

Continuum Chess (Yes Laboratories, Suffolk, 1964). Board 9x9x15 and each piece occupies a point along a temporal axis 9 quanta long, giving 10,935 points of play. The rules are calculated to baffle, thus: "A red king on extra space positive or a white king on extra space negative lines shall be deemed the winner unless adjacent to minus chessman." For the resolute there is an advanced version of the game. There appears to be no evidence that either version has been played. (Booklet Continuum Chess, British Library X441/255)

You saw that right: That's a footnote, and there's one for every variant. In its way, it's as impressive as Continuum Chess.

I guess it's worth exploring why I like chess variants so much. One thing I like is that it's difficult to pin down what the platonic ideal of "chess" is; what is it that all these things are variants of? Some are subvariants; many add rules or pieces to Western (or International) Chess, but some are of the same generation as Western Chess. I like how all this can exist, and I'm fascinated that it does. No other game has as bushy a generational tree as chess, and I think it speaks to something important about its cultural and intellectual meaning over the years. I have a complete-enough-for-me collection of regional chess variants; I don't have many of the proprietary ones (I thought Tile Chess was hideous), although I'm scratching my chin about Knizia's box full of variant fun. Pritchard discusses Knizia's chess variants at some length--three pages--and they sound like pretty successful ways to turn chess into a Euro.

Pritchard missed a few. I'd have loved to read his description of Warmaster Chess 2000, which garnered an almost unfathomable 2.54 rating on the Geek. It also somehow earned an epic review, which I "thumbed" in appreciation. It makes you wonder how much else he missed, and what that means: This man was streets ahead of everyone else in his knowledge of his subject, and he still could never quite get everything.

This is vastly enjoyable reading. I like it in much the same way I liked reading Connection Games: Variations on a Theme, which it very much resembles in style. I like exploring the world of games. I like the math behind them, the history behind them, the culture behind them. Books like this open up a whole world of games that were heretofore unknown to me, which is hard for me not to appreciate. This is turning into one of those books--my favorite kind--where I can open it up at random and start reading.

Early reports, then, are very positive.