Nine Easy Ways to Make Chess Fun

hello everybody and welcome to week seven of chess month in which our team shines a light on two player games and today we're looking at all the fun you can have with a chessboard so this should be a short video as we say in the uk i'm only yanking your bum in this video i'm going to be showing you my favorite chess variants offering new rules and twists that take chess's hair down and loosen it up and generally uncork the rook from its rear end and later i'm going to show you a few of the chess video games that goof around with the foundation of chess like a cool skateboardist using the concrete foundation of a skatepark to pop a wheelie impressing onlookers and hopefully you but to kick off i'm gonna offer some official shut up and sit down thoughts on the game of chess so let's check it out i'm stalling because this is a frightening game to try and cover which is why for the first time in shut up and sit down history i got in touch with a panel of experts on this call we should have dr stephen peter a phd in historic games from the university of benbridge peter can you hear me yeah yeah fantastic also calling in should be dr james mctavish the head of edinburgh university's turn based department mctavish can you hear me hey and finally uh it says here we should have jonathan ying designer of bargain quest and power rangers heroes of the grid jonathan are you there hey quinn's happy to be here fantastic gosh there's so much talent on this call i guess let's begin by defining our terms uh dr mctavish what is chess excuse me are we being paid uh we don't actually have budget for uh any of you but the amount of exposure that you're all gonna get is ah no no no ah okay listen no one on team shut up and sit down would argue that chess isn't a mightily clever contest you know the act of trying to skewer your opponent's king while keeping your safe is so engrossing as to cast a spell of silence over most chess games that cannot be denied and it's so easy to get lyrical about this game you know to me the act of playing chess feels like being stood on the banks of a river that is the present and then casting my mind out into this ever-changing river of possible future game states so i think what if i move this piece what would that be like and then i reel my mind in and think what about this piece if i do that and cast my mind out again however if we can just put down the worthy analogies for a second and if we can make an effort to cut through the choking cultural fog that billows off of the chest set and makes it quite hard to judge as a game we're left with an uncomfortable truth which is simply that playing chess is a bummer and it is frequently devoid of surprise of charm and sometimes even reward listen chess really is two things at its simplest one planning as far ahead as possible into the future by examining the counterintuitive movement of all these discrete pieces which is simply hard work and two it is a particularly cruel fight to the death for two players that makes no attempts to hide who's winning and losing which means unless you and your opponent are particularly well matched chess is a game that expects you to work as hard as possible simply to make your opponent work harder before you inevitably lose every game of go felt like i was slowly mapping out a mystery that was at once mathematically beautiful and beautifully human but when i walk away from games of chess i simply don't feel enlarged in the same way i'm a people pleaser foremost in my mind when i finish a game of chess is that either me or my opponent had a horrible time losing getting caught in the trash compactor of our opponent's moves do you ever think about what a horribly dispiriting bit of design check mate is a game of chess can only end when you are your opponent has shut all the doors and windows so the other player has nothing to do left but die a lot has been made of how chess is a war well that's as maybe but the end of a game of chess is always pest control but what if i told you you could have fun with a chessboard today do you have a roguish disregard for the classics will you listen to british man on the internet well get ready because it turns out there are literally hundreds of chest variants out there many of which are hilariously complicated some of which are hauntingly complicated but lots of which are just good clean fun i'm going to be showing you some of my favorite chest variants which are all incredibly simple to learn and can be played with just one chest set like mine there's all the pieces are on the floor i don't know why that is peasant revolt is just chess where one player has three knights and the other player has all the pawns and immediately it's like someone popped open a release valve in chess and all of the pressure drained out because peasant's revolt is no longer an indictment on your intelligence it's not even symmetrical in fact the degree to which it's absurd will become very clear when one player has to try and checkmate somebody using just two knights which is a bit like trying to pick up a greased mouse with a pair of chopsticks but the real joy of asymmetric chest variants is going to be instantly familiar to anyone who's enjoyed asymmetric board games it's delightful to feel special and empowered and to watch your opponent try and wriggle their way out of situations that you don't have to deal with if you're willing to make some substitutions you could also try horde chess in which one player takes on 36 pawns which is even sillier and scarier for both sides than peasant revolt and as such even more fun ah you've also got to try monster chess in which white starts with just four pawns but for every move black takes white can move twice it's a setup that makes both players feel like they're in a horror film i'm showing you these asymmetrical variants first for a couple of reasons and the first of which is i simply love that i know these variants now because whenever i'm in a future situation where there's a chess set in someone's house or a big outdoor garden set now i have a better answer to the question of do you want to play chess now i don't have to go maybe instead i can say yeah but let me show you something cool i also love these asymmetrical variants because they solve my biggest problem with chess which is that the end of a game feels horrible for one of you with an asymmetric game you don't feel that you failed when you lose because you were really playing a different game to your opponent instead you just experienced a thing together and that's lovely but maybe what you want isn't lovely maybe what you want is cool [Music] very much that too fast too furious in our list of variants atomic chess is just chess except whenever a piece takes another piece it explodes killing itself and everything else that is one square away gillicas and like all of the variants we're looking at today atomic chess is at once silly but also it preserves the heart of chess as if in formaldehyde because this is still simply a game of thinking as many moves ahead as possible except you're gonna learn it faster in the same way that you'd learn anything faster when the consequences of failure is an explosion that kills tons of people but i also found atomic chess is a game that was more replayable than normal chess okay because it's so fast i mean you can and will routinely check the king just by threatening to blow them up in a pawns blast radius games are over very very fast but that means you just reset the board again and in playing through the same opening over and over and over again i found that i was actually learning for a foxy middle ground between the absurdity of atomic chess and the dusty restraint of normal chess you could look at stealth bomber chess stealth bomber chess sees both players secretly writing down which of their pieces will explode in the manner of atomic chests before the game starts introducing some welcome uncertainty and bluffing and risk taking to the classic game or if your taste in action movies is more john wick than michael bay i had some fun playing rifle chess a simple version of chess where pieces simply don't move when they take another piece i am impressed with my chest variants yet and if so do you trust me chess is traditionally played on two chessboards side by side but i prefer it on two half chess boards with what's called a demi chess setup because as we'll soon see is hard alice chess is just completely normal chess it's very normal nothing to see about nothing to worry about oh yeah one small tweak which is after you make a move and a piece is done capturing it moves to the corresponding space through the looking glass and only comes back onto the main board when you choose to move it again and moves are only legal if the space on the other side of the board you would be moving to is also empty so that is a completely manageable puzzle isn't it incidentally if you think that sounds cool and you happen to have three friends and two chessboards you could also try the very popular bug house chess a four player variant of normal chess where any pieces you capture can be brought on by your teammate as reinforcements alice chess does not make chess funnier or faster you know compared to the other chess variants we were playing ah but i like it all the same because what it does is take the fundamentals of chess and just warp them and make them so much more obtuse and annoying that chess no longer feels like a fair fight it no longer feels like me and my opponent are stoically weighing our chesticles to determine once and for all who is the better human no instead in alice chess it feels like something we're stumbling through together and one of us will win but it's the game that we're fighting you know alice chess is like now a game where i can get spanked real hard by my opponent and i'll clutch my aching buttocks and say oh you know what that was that was awesome what you just did having second thoughts about that line in the script but i want to end with a variant that takes us full circle i was quite mean about chess earlier so let me show you a variant that changes the classic game the least while turning it into something that i still enjoy synchronistic chess is simply chess where both players decide on their move and take it at the same time obvious advantage this makes chess faster it also adds a load of fuzzy human elements to the ordinarily stoic game it makes chess surprising it makes it silly and it makes it delightfully imperfect since both players are moving on a board that would have changed by the end of their own move synchronistic chess feels like chess after a spa day it's enjoyed some self-care it's chilled out and as a result i actually want to spend time with it although credit where it's due the most fun i've had playing chess in the last five years has actually been playing video games anyone who's listened to episode 117 of the shut up and sit down podcast will have heard me and tom wax lyrical about 5d chess with multiverse time travel on steam on your turn you can move a piece on the board and or through time creating a limitless array of alternate timelines and the winner is whoever check makes a king in one of them which may or may not be a relief because you may or may not be physically nauseous at trying to hold the game's possibility space in your head which is a bit like trying to hold the contents of a plate of hot spaghetti in an open hand did your opponent put you in check no worries why not send your king into another timeline creating a game where you have no king and can't lose as well as another game where you have two kings oh no i don't think you thought this through at all i've gotta say i'm also a big fan of chesh a game for ios where neither player has any idea what any of their pieces do when the game starts i can only find out by trying to move them which comes with the risk that if the piece can only be moved into your own pieces then you have to attack and kill yourself and i find it side-splittingly funny when your opponent can't take a piece that's right next to them because apparently none of their pieces do that alternatively if you'd like to show a computer whose boss is supposed to have a computer give you the rules equivalent of a wedgie we'd be remiss not to mention really bad chess on ios and android a one player game that lets you take on ai but where both players have completely scrambled setups when you start your career in really bad chess you'll have way better pieces than the ai but the more you rank up the less and less kind the randomized setup becomes thank you very much for watching our video on chess everybody if you've enjoyed this video then you could definitely watch me check out another abstract game which is go i'm a lot kinder to that than i am to chess because deep down i am a weeaboo also you could check out tom's review of war chest because a you can't spell war chest without chess and b uh you two fight two player abstract games have come a long way since chess was invented thank you very much for watching everybody

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 194,458

Rating: 4.8707361 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Chess, Chess review, Chess variants

Id: 8yrfLDsEcQ4

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/That_LTSB_Life]

Gigachess wierdo kids next door emitting constant high pitch screams so I can't really find the words I'm looking for but Gigachess is really good and deserves a mention.

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