Gaming Blog

 This week I played another variant of chess. The variant is called 4-player Chess. The variant has a free-for-all mode and a teams mode. I played the teams mode. In the teams mode of 4-player chess, there is four players. The players are on a larger modified board that is in the shape of the cross. Each player's pieces are on one end of the cross-looking board. The players that are directly across from each other are partners. When one of the players checkmates one of the opposing team's players, their team wins. Partners can draw arrows on the board to suggest moves or threats to pieces that only they, and not their opposing team, can see. The game I played had timers on each player's turn. If the player didn't move before the timer ran out, the opposing team automatically won. This timer made me feel pressured. I noticed almost immediately that my partner was more experienced than me and pointed out threats I exposed myself to at the start of the game. My team won th...

 This week I played another variant of chess. This variant was called Fog of War. This is played like a normal game of chess, except that each player can only see the squares they can legally move to. All other squares are grayed out for them. Also, there is no check, checkmates, or stalemates. The way a player wins is by capturing the other player's king. When playing, it made me think about the calculated risks one might take in war that involves an absence of the certainty of whether one will survive. The strategies I employed were moving pawns for the mere purpose of getting a better view of the board layout. Also, I moved rooks along files to get long range views. I lost because I didn't notice the time limit on my turn was running out and I timed out. However, it was likely I would have lost anyways because I only had a few pawns and my king left.  The game felt just as immersive and replayable as normal chess. The game's rhetoric about war seemed different. The game...