TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

The Bone Queen And The Frost Bishop: Playtesting Scavenger Chess In Plasticine

My chess variant stalled a while, cos I rarely felt like coding when my work day was done. So I bought a chess set and some plasticine to try some ideas lo-fi style. What follows is how my first game of this iteration of Scavenger Chess played out.

The board: littered with precious items and horsies. Units start with limited range, grab a horse to boost it to max.

Rules sidenote: The limited range is to ease the mental load of having to consider every piece on the board when deciding where to move, which I find tedious in Chess (see: being exhaustive). So each piece has an attack range of 2, and can also move 1 in any direction if there’s no unit there. So a Rook’s attack/move options look like this:

The move rule makes Bishops less rigid, and makes it much less awkward to grab items. Although it adds move options, I find it doesn’t add much cognitive load because a) it doesn’t change threats, and b) it’s universal, same for every piece type.

The Dark Horse also lets you trample (move options may be used as attacks), the Pale Horse is more nimble (move to any unoccupied space in range 2).

Board setup is random with some attempt at balance, plus a balancing rule:

One player chooses which corner to start in, then the other player takes the first turn. So each gets a different advantage.

Each player starts with a Queen, a Bishop, a Rook and a Pawn. I may do some kind of army budget idea eventually, but I tried that with a previous iteration and it made it hard to judge item balance, since army misbalance colours the results.

Rules sidenote: Pawns act like a King, but die when they take a piece (because the pawn is a shitshow).

Black chose the corner with Skull and the Pale Horse, white chose the one with the Crown (gain a King) and Frost (freeze enemies for 1 turn).

White grabbed Frost with their Bishop, Black’s own Bishop skipped the Skull to grab the Pale Horse early, then White spent a turn to level their Frost Bishop up to 2.

• Lvl 1: freeze the enemy that kills you
• Lvl 2: freeze adjacent enemies when you kill
• Lvl 3: freeze adjacent enemies after every move

Black’s queen grabs the Skull:

• Lvl 1: Create a skeleton (functionally, a pawn) on death
• Lvl 2: Create a skeleton on kill
• Lvl 3: Create a skeleton with each move

And their mounted Bishop grabs the Flame: like Frost, but ignites tiles: units on burning tiles must move or die at the end of their turn.

White swoops in with their Level 3 Frost Bishop, freezing the Bone Queen for a turn, with the hope of safely grabbing the Bugle of Command next turn.

He gets it: white can now move 2 pieces per turn as long as this Frost Bishop lives to toot the bugle. But it gives black time to grab the Dark Horse with their now Level 2 Bone Queen, leaving black with the only long range units for the rest of the game!

The Bugle is strong, though. White has grabbed the Crown, for a free King, and the extra Bugle move opens up a pincer move: threatening the Bone Queen from one side while freezing her in place with the Frost Bishop.

Parping disrespectfully in her frozen bony face! Rude!!

The Bone Queen spawns a skeleton as she dies, to take on white’s King, while their Fire Bishop retreats out of the killzone.

But fatal mistake! Their rook and Fire Bishop are now adjacent, and white’s maxed out Frost Bishop can freeze them both with one move!

In fact, he has them stun locked. Since he also has the Bugle, he can keep freezing them while their Rook grabs the Stone element and levels up to 3, creating rocky fortifications as it stomps towards the helpless Bishop.

Rules sidenote: Enemies can move onto (but not through) empty fortified tiles to clear them, but they can’t enter occupied fortified tiles. Friends can move freely through them. (Maybe they should be sentient vines, to make sense of this?)

Black’s last ditch effort is to sneak a pawn out and grab the Poison element, so at least whatever takes it will die. But by then, white’s Stone Rook has killed the Frost Bishop and black’s Rook is boxed in. White cleans up, sacrificing the Stone Rook to take the Poison Pawn. It’s over, white wins.

This felt really juicy and fun to play, and I love the goofy maximalist language of it: “Your Bugle Frost Bishop is no match for my level 3 Bone Queen!” Could not say which way it was going until the pincer movement, which was prob a blunder by black. Having both the Horsies vs Bugle might be winnable for either side?

A playtest of the previous version of Scavenger Chess also saw each side secure powerful but very different items, I’d love it if that became a signature of this game. I think the random board layout has the potential to stop those matchups being foregone conclusions where certain items are always best – ideally, it should depend on what else you have access to and what units you can grab it with.

A few issues, though – here’s what I’ll focus on for the next iteration:

• Frost stunlock is boring, need to rethink what Frost does. Maybe it freezes the tile, and a unit on an Ice tile can move but not attack, and can be killed by other units’ ‘moves’ (all units can move 1 in any dir in Scavenger Chess if no unit is there)
• You tend to move the same piece a lot, leaving others on the bench – might let you move 2 per turn by default, 3 with Bugle.
• Skipping a move to level up is dull, I’ll add creeps to kill instead.

And boy is all of that gonna be easier to change in my brain and plasticine than reworking code. Some of this stuff won’t be easy to add to my digital prototype (which doesn’t even have items), but the more stuff I rule out and rethink in a physical prototype, the more coding time I’ve saved.