Card Chess

Chess is a temple you enter barefoot

Designer’s note

Great! That General’s Gambit came out nice and fun. Now, can I make the actual chess game, with its classic rules, faster and more fun to play?

But wait a minute! I don’t want to repeat what I’d done in a chess variant with dice. I need more:

• A) I don’t want new unit types, a new board, or new rules for how those units behave.
• B) Chess is absolutely fantastic as a game, and is like a temple where you need to enter bare feet.
• C) Whatever I design should be playable with a standard board plus something anyone can use (not a dice this time, for sure) to play in the real world.
• D) Does a faster chess exist? Yes — people who are grandmasters play it at lightning speed.
• E) What do those grandmasters have which a general foe like me doesn’t have? Brains to think tens of moves ahead, and do a lot of mental math.

So what if I constrain that grandmaster?

Perfect, that’s the theme. My moves are constrained, and so are my opponent’s.

Where the idea came from

They say in WW II each warring country on both sides had constraints — on resources, minerals, time, and everything you can practically think of. What chess represents is the brain behind war: how good are you at that Art of War!

So to solve the resource crunches, some brilliant brains came up with the Art of Optimization, a branch of maths born out of exactly that problem — and it runs the world today, from Uber to your grocery delivery to the supply chains of big corporates and industries.

Ha! That’s an overload. How the hell is that going to get applied to classic chess?

The constraint is a deck of cards

Let me use cards. A standard poker deck, which everyone in the world probably owns already — no need to purchase any custom made cards from me.

Both players play with constraints, and the constraints are exposed: each player can see what cards the opponent is holding for their next turn, and what they cannot play.

And that is exactly the hammer point. Let me attack his queen with a bishop, because he doesn’t have a card to move his queen, nor to play any other unit which could block his queen from my bishop’s attack on that next turn.

Neither of us has to be a big brain

Perfect. Now both players don’t need to calculate ten moves ahead — and they can’t, because the war dynamics keep changing, and so do their constraints. Planning for the next couple, max three, move strategies is what pays off in a win.

It’s here, it’s live. Play it against the various AI difficulty levels — but you will enjoy it more with your folks, in the online player vs player matches. Try it.