Target and Cardchess
Aug. 14th, 2004 04:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramBoth Ricky’s and Paragon Sports carry YakPak bags; neither had the Medium Tech Flapdoozy.
GC-in-E at Beth’s mom’s place back in Brooklyn, yo. Small turnout, and I only played two games, but they were both new to me:
Target: A light card game where you try to put together melds to grab the most points worth of target cards. Some clever balancing mechanics. We played with six players though the game is supposed to have two to four; this may have made it more random than it ought to be. I won, beating![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mnemex out by one point.
Cardchess: This ate up most of the evening. It’s an intriguing chess variant designed by people who don’t know chess as well as they think they do. It played on a 10x10 board, with the pieces being cards that start play randomized and face-down on the outer two rows of squares. Oh, and it takes up to four players. On your turn you flip one of your face-down cards to face-up (if you can), and then move a piece as normal in chess. The first sign of trouble was when we realized that chess has rules that don’t seem to apply in this game, and aren’t mentioned in the game’s summary of chess rules. Sure, no castling, that’s obvious, but what about pawn promotion, or capturing en passant? And the checkmate rules were ambiguous. And there’s no way in hell it plays faster than regular chess. Normal chess rewards spending lots of time thinking (unless you’ve played so much that the patterns have soaked into your brain). With four players, you have three opponents, and therefore three angles of attack to think about. Still, some surprising and entertaining strategies emerge from the game.
GC-in-E at Beth’s mom’s place back in Brooklyn, yo. Small turnout, and I only played two games, but they were both new to me:
Target: A light card game where you try to put together melds to grab the most points worth of target cards. Some clever balancing mechanics. We played with six players though the game is supposed to have two to four; this may have made it more random than it ought to be. I won, beating
mnemex out by one point. Cardchess: This ate up most of the evening. It’s an intriguing chess variant designed by people who don’t know chess as well as they think they do. It played on a 10x10 board, with the pieces being cards that start play randomized and face-down on the outer two rows of squares. Oh, and it takes up to four players. On your turn you flip one of your face-down cards to face-up (if you can), and then move a piece as normal in chess. The first sign of trouble was when we realized that chess has rules that don’t seem to apply in this game, and aren’t mentioned in the game’s summary of chess rules. Sure, no castling, that’s obvious, but what about pawn promotion, or capturing en passant? And the checkmate rules were ambiguous. And there’s no way in hell it plays faster than regular chess. Normal chess rewards spending lots of time thinking (unless you’ve played so much that the patterns have soaked into your brain). With four players, you have three opponents, and therefore three angles of attack to think about. Still, some surprising and entertaining strategies emerge from the game.
