When I started writing books for juniors with Tim Onions, the first thing I did was go and learn Japanese Chess (Shogi) and Chinese Chess (Xiangchi), because I wanted to remember what it was like to be a beginner, trying to grapple with a complex game but with a limited conceptual armoury  (e.g. how does the horse move again?)

During lockdown, I’ve had a regular date with David Beckwith to play board games online.  We both like that category of game in which chess fits: abstract strategy games.  (You may be interested to learn that chess comes only 46th in the list of best abstract strategy games [or used to].)

We’ve been playing at boardspace.net, a rather wonderful achievement by David Dyer, who has created online versions of classic and newer games — I think there’s about a hundred there.  We started at A and worked our way through to Z, picking out ones we thought were promising, then went through A->Z again to see if we missed anything.  It was surprising how many games were decided because one or other of us forgot a rule!

So in the last 18 months I have tried to learn a LOT of new games, and I can roundly endorse what I read in the journal Games and Puzzles Design, by its editor in the first issue:

“Embed the rules.” (Cameron Browne)

“To ‘embed the rules’ means to use relevant features of the game’s physical components (board, pieces, environment, etc.), to enforce implicit rules which then do not need to be explicitly stated to players. This might also be described as
‘hiding the rules in the equipment’… “

This applies particularly when pieces have very different values or movement.   A nice example is from when I was battling with shogi.   There is a quite a barrier for the non-Japanese reader in getting to grips with the characters written on the pieces.

(Oliver Orschiedt‘s picture, used under CC)

I found a kids set, which had the moves written on the pieces, and the pieces of clearly different sizes:

Not obvious from the dismal photographs, but the pieces bear tick marks in the corners and on edges to show which directions they can move.

Another nice way of approaching the same goal with identically shaped and sized pieces was this one from Schmidt Games: the moves are painted on the pieces.

Inspired by these sets, I made insect-themed sets, for the full game and a simpler version Dobutsu Shogi:

Not perfect, the unpromoted yellow ladybirds on the third row up should really have only one spot. but they came with 4 and I didn’t bother to paint them out.  I was happy with the caterpillar promoting to butterfly!

And I found a symbol set, also very nice:

Got the idea?

So, I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a way of teaching Western chess with a set where the rules were embedded?

Of course, I was late to the party: Bauhaus got there decades ago.

Kent Wang’s photo (shared under CC)

You can quibble about the King and Queen but I think that’s as close as you’re going to get to embedding the moves in the pieces.  And wouldn’t it be an easier game to learn if that was our standard set, and not the Staunton?

From Boardspace, games like Hive, Cookie Disco, Arimaa and Xiangchi were a miss on the Browne rule, while Mijnlieff was a definite hit.