Block Chess

A take on the classic game

SUMMARY

Block Chess is a solo project I worked on as a student to improve my design skills. It is the result of a design exercise I underwent inspired by Raph Koster's 2014 GDC talk 'Practical Creativity'. The intention of Block Chess was to come up with a meaningful deviation from Chess while maintaining it's core mechanics and it's heavily strategic focus. While I don't consider the game perfect, after much playtesting I think it accomplishes those goals quite well.

WHY

While theory is definitely useful when it comes to designing games, very little can replace experience. Making, bending, and breaking games is how anyone will learn how to make something 'fun', as subjective as the term is.

In 2017, game design legend Raph Koster gave the talk 'Practical Creativity' at GDC, and I listen to regularly off the vault. The talk overall is his perspective on game-to-game iteration, how game's basic mechanics and context affects the gameplay and perception of the game, and originality in general. Koster outlines different ways novel ideas have been made throughout the years and the different mini-games that we as designers should acknowledge in order to abstract and iterate on whatever we're working on.

So, after listening to this talk for the first time, I decided I wanted to design something within a month timeframe as to not linger too long and keep it more of a design exercise.

HOW

Koster outlines some simple ways of coming up with new ideas in the talk; one way that I took to was the combination and constraint on new designs. I happened to be working the night I first watched the talk, so it was on my mind while work was slow.

I decided to look at the games we happen to have in the restaurant and the two that stuck out to me were Chess and some Janga clone. It occurred to me that the Janga pieces fit reasonably well on the board, and at the same time I had another thought. Chess, a abstracted game about medieval war, is missing representation for one of the biggest components of warfare in that era: Terrain!

Notoriously terrain has always been a huge factor in warfare and a major component in the strategic element of it. Chess represents well the idea of positional advantage, but as a Chess player myself, the idea of adding a layer of strategic and varied terrain in a game (as long as gameplay it is completely foreseeable once the game starts) was exciting! So I decided to pursue the idea.

Version 1

Version one of block chess was essentially just basic chess with my block system graphed on top. Blocks act as difficult terrain that pieces must stop at before moving past. Placing the blocks is a set up phase of the game where players take turns (white to black) putting down blocks squarely on the playfield.

The first big roadblock I came across was that the game felt MUCH slower. Pawns often got stuck behind walls so advancing for either side was hard. I quickly took out all pawns to avoid this as the blocks acted as the early game's barriers.

Version 2

I started playtesting right away with my boss the night I came up with the design. It worked well enough once I got past explaining the mechanics (it did help he already knew chess). Something we noticed after playing some games was the strength of, surprisingly, the knight.

In vanilla chess, the knight's movement isn't hindered at all by whatever it's passing over as it moves. Now, exactly where the knight is passing over is paramount. Because the rules on whether the knight moves the short part of their "L" or the long part, the knight often had an extremely high amount of movement options if near any blocks.

I eventually landed on making the knight have to go the long part of the L before the short. This brought it in line with the balance of the rest of the pieces in the game.

If you're interested in looking at the rules, feel free to check out my google doc on the game or my mini-blog on it's creation.

The Rules