Chess variants I made up because I can’t sleep: a thread.
HOPPY CHESS: knights now move like pawns. Pawns now move like knights.
SUICIDE KINGS: the goal is still to checkmate your opponent’s king, BUT ALSO, you control your opponent’s king instead of your own.
LIFTING CHESS: this is just chess but the pieces are very heavy. Pawns weigh ten pounds, kings weigh 60. You can’t take a piece unless you can lift it. You have to pick up your opponent’s king to checkmate
HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE: king can swap places with either of his rooks at any time. No limit on frequency
CHAOS CHESS: you choose a color king to defeat, but control all pieces of both colors on the right or left side of the board. This means when a piece travel’s to your opponent’s half, they can use it. Still have to be opposite colors to take pieces though
THE AMERICAN DREAM: any piece can be promoted when it reaches the opposite end of the board, except for kings.
TERM LIMITS: every ten moves players must declare a new piece “king.” New “kings” maintain former movement rules, but are now the piece that must be checkmated.
CHUBBY BUNNY: every time you take a piece you have to put it in your mouth. If it won’t fit you can’t take it.
BATTLE ROYALE: 32 players each control a single piece. Last piece standing wins.
THE PIECES HAVE GUNS: each piece can capture pieces on squares they can legally move to, without actually moving.
Capturing in this way exhausts the player’s turn for the round though
OKAY my beloved spouse and daily chess partner is telling me to try to go to sleep again. I may post more ridiculous chess variants tomorrow.
A couple more chess variants I came up with as I was drifting off to sleep.
CONTRACT KILLERS: all pieces can checkmate, but each piece can only capture other pieces of its type (pawns take pawns, knights take knights, etc.)
BROKEN SPAWNER: each player is only allowed to have one captured piece at a time. Every time a second piece is captured, the capturing player must put one of the pieces back in a valid starting location for that piece.
TRAP DOOR: before the game, each player writes down a square on the board that has a secret trap door. Any piece that moves onto that square will automatically be captured. Reveal the trap door the 1st time any piece moves onto that square. The trap door remains active afterwards
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This is why I say F2P mobile game design is like pop music. Aspiring pretentious indie musicians think any idiot can spew out a top 40 hit, but it turns out making something millions of people dedicate millions of hours to is more complex than you think!
I’m going to bed soon, so I’m not going to go into detail about Candy Crush in particular, but here’s a quick breakdown of the last few years in mobile gaming, for people who think games *like* Candy Crush are more casual than, say, CoD.
With the horrible injustice done to Breonna Taylor and the death of RBG, I’ve talked to a lot of (white) friends whose spirits are struggling.
If you grew up inside a family and/or faith tradition that didn’t prepare you for social justice work, this thread’s for you.
It’s vitally important to remember that odds are excellent you will never see the results of the work you do in your life.
For a lot of white ppl, even when you’re not looking for “ally cookies,” there’s a reasonable human part of you that is motivated bc you want to see CHANGE.
And if you’re in this because you want to SEE Black liberation, the end of the carceral state, whatever your goal: realizing the enormity of your task will likely crush your will to continue.
Don’t do it because you want to SEE justice, do it because it’s THE RIGHT THING TO DO.
Here's the thing that really strikes me about the “But if you don’t buy the HP game you’re hurting game developers!” argument:
Do you have any idea how many video games I don’t buy EVERY SINGLE DAY? By that measure I’m one of the worst things to EVER HAPPEN to game developers!
Sometimes? People don’t want to buy games? Because there is something they find unappealing about that game??
It is never a moral requirement to purchase a fucking video game, and certainly not one that puts money in the pocket of the most visible TERF in the world.
I have excitedly retweeted and celebrated with friends when they have shipped games they worked incredibly hard on, and then I have NOT PURCHASED THOSE GAMES because they weren’t my thing.
Kids have started going back to school. There is no remote learning. Children are required to take off their masks during class for some godawful reason. This is going to be a disaster, and no matter how bad it gets, they’re not going to shut the schools again because “economy."
I can’t actually express how fucked it is. Here are pictures: one from my youngest’s mandatory orientation, where bringing a parent was required. The other is of the masking rules, which also stresses that wearing masks is occasionally permissible, but never mandatory.
Parents weren’t allowed into the classrooms on the tour as part of the hygiene requirements(?), but we WERE shown that our kids will literally be sharing desks.
Whenever I am incredibly frustrated with the state of the video game industry, it’s so comforting to know that tabletop is right there to remind me how much worse it could be
For friends who don’t pay attention to this kind of inside baseball: a prestigious tabletop award was given… to the concept of “Black Excellence,” with a handful of “honorees” named. All of whom are cool people who, to be perfectly honest, deserve their own individual award.
These “honorees” are not award-winners, and cannot style themselves as such. This is interesting for a couple of reasons, chief of which is this:
I’ve been out of the tabletop world for a long time, but last I heard, the award committee was made up of previous award winners.