Editor’s Note: Over the Christmas week the Meeple Guild will be offering up a game-a-day as a holiday treat. Enjoy!
YORKTON - So this time The Meeple Guild returns to a game genre over the years we have grown to generally enjoy – the realm of chess variants.
This time it’s Jabberwocky Chess – connected superficially at least to Alice In Wonderland -- which one assumes is a chess game since the word is right there in the name.
And, when you go to play all the pieces of a familiar chess set are there – well sort of.
Yet, Jabberwocky Chess seems less ‘chess-like’ than many variants – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
To start with this is a variant you will need to do some ‘bodgering’ on to get to the table because pieces change with every move.
Jabberwocky is a fairy chess piece, represented on the chessboard by the King, which moves and captures like a regular chess king, but at the end of each move it turns into a different type of chess piece, depending on the previous transformation, following the chain of transformation: king to pawn, knight to bishop, rook to queen and then back to a king.
So after moving a king, the king is transformed into a pawn of the same colour, an so on.
Now you could just have a box of various chess sets and switch out pieces, but my solution was to grab some chunky wooden cubes and then cut out pictures of each piece to apply to a face of the cube, (see photo), which can then just be rotated. It was admittedly a lot of work that by the time it was complete was it had become a tad tedious – 32 pieces meant a lot of clipping – but the set looks pretty good I think. It is likely the only dedicated Jabberwocky Chess set in Saskatchewan – likely Canada – I’d think, so that is rather cool too.
So by now you are wondering how Jabberwocky Chess feels different from chess?
Well, you win when an opponent no longer has a king on the board – again sort of standard although you each start with 16.
The difference here is that captures are forced – which is a mechanic checkers players will be used too. So when a capture is possible you have to take it, which more often than not, especially early in the game just leads to an exchange of pieces.
But you also lose a king when you move one. It changes to a pawn remember. So you can trap an opponent setting up a position where they must capture with their last king, and in so doing lose because they have no king remaining.
This situation, in which a player will be left without a single king when making his next move, is called the Jabberwocky Mate, and it is gratifying for the winner as I can attest from the third game of the initial afternoon of play.
If you are looking for the next great chess variant this is not it – stick to Plunder or Omega chess for example.
However, for something quite different, a chess-a-like requiring a very different approach, which is quite quick and quite fun, then Jabberwocky Chess is certainly worth a long look.
