In 2019, experimental game developer and current university professor Pippin Barr released a browser game consisting of eight very silly variants of chess – a blatant attack on the dignity of a strategy experience with roots stretching back a thousand years, which Barr justified as an effort to “let non-chess players have fun.”
Professor Barr, we don’t know cut chess. We also don’t randomize the appearance of the pieces, or make the board slippery, or generally behave like a toddler making up the rules as we go along.
Despite the shock and outrage of all concerned, Barr returned the following year with another set of variations, including “chess plus fog of war” and “chess inspired by the wall drawings of New York minimalist artist Sol LeWitt.” Then he I did it a third timeplaguing the world with the knowledge of “what if chess, but also dressage” and “chess: psionic edition”.
We haven’t covered the third set of variants – perhaps because when you’re relentlessly attacked by a ravenous beast, there comes a point where it’s safer to play dead, and perhaps because we had to go write about, say, an Assassin’s Creed game instead. But Barr continued undeterred.
He just came out eight more variants. They include “what if chess, but on a treadmill”, and “what if chess, but also Candy Crush Saga”, and “what if chess, but slower than drying paint”. As with all of Barr’s other creations, the challenge and, if necessary, the charm of these creations is trying to make a standard chess game take place in a world gone completely mad.
Perhaps the most thoughtful of these new variations is Correspondence, which is really just an online chess game featuring Barr himself. Professor Barr, you might regret exposing yourself to endless chess players online. I’m going to write your game’s URL on every public toilet door from here to Canterbury.
By my calculations, that brings us to 36 serious injuries to the chess majesty. You’ve probably played enough chess, Professor Barr. Why not tackle Monopoly instead? If you’ll forgive a layman’s opinion, Monopoly sucks. The average game of Monopoly would absolutely benefit from an injection of psionic energies.
