Back in 2019, experimental game developer and actual university professor Pippin Barr released a browser game consisting of eight, very silly variations on chess – a flagrant assault on the dignity of a strategy experience whose roots go back a thousand years, which Barr justified as an effort to “allow non-players of chess to get a kick out of the game”.
Professor Barr, we do not kick chess. We do not randomise the appearance of pieces, either, or make the board all slippery, or in general behave like a toddler making up the rules as they go.
Notwithstanding the shock and outrage of all concerned, Barr came back the following year with another set of variations, including “chess plus fog of war” and “chess as inspired by the wall drawings of minimalist New York artist Sol LeWitt.” Then he did it a third time, afflicting the world with the knowledge of “what if chess, but also dressage” and “chess: psionic edition”.
We didn’t cover the third round of variants – possibly because when you are being relentlessly attacked by a ravenous beast, there comes a point when it is safer to play dead, and possibly because we had to go and write about e.g. an Assassin’s Creed game instead. But Barr has continued undeterred.
He’s just released another eight variants. They include “what if chess, but on a travelator”, 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 you must, the charm of these creations is trying to make a standard game of chess happen in a world that has gone utterly insane.
Possibly the most thoughtful of these new variants is Correspondence, which is actually just an online game of chess with Barr himself. Professor Barr, you may come to regret exposing yourself to an infinity of online chess players. I am going to write the URL for your game on every public toilet door from here to Canterbury.
By my count, this brings us to 36 grievous injuries unto the majesty of chess. Surely, Professor Barr, you have messed with chess enough. Why not go pick on Monopoly, instead? If you will forgive a layperson’s opinion, Monopoly sucks ass. The average game of Monopoly would absolutely benefit from an injection of psionic energies.
