For Plaything of the Gods, I've been exploring how I can best make use of the elements of chess as part of the materials for a storygame. As ephemeral as the narratives from RPGs are, having physical objects as a tactile part of the game can be an excellent way to "ground" play. It's the same thing that I think makes dice such a fixture of RPG paraphernalia, and really shines in games that draw it into the play experience — like Ross Cowman's lovely game Fall of Magic, which I got to play at Indie Hurricane this year.

A chessboard & its pieces seemed like a good fit for the game from the outset. The source material I'm drawing from makes the parallels easy enough to see, and chess sets are readily available in most homes, too. Making use of those objects is something I want to maximize as a creative choice, which is where design space comes in.

Design space is a concept I first encountered in the columns of one of the chief creative forces behind Magic: The Gathering, Mark Rosewater. Whatever complaints others may have about the game, it's impossible to assert that the team behind that game has a poor understanding of how to make the most out of a limited array of components. In their case, those components are mana colors, card types, and card mechanics old & new. And time and again, Rosewater demonstrates in his column how the abundance or lack of design space in a concept influences their creative decisions and leads to better game-making.

To see what shakes out, I decided to make as exhausting a catalogue of the design elements present in chess as I could. I cheated a bit, in that some of the entries are elements that could be used in any game, whereas others are a kind of "thematic efficiency" that a game is afforded by using pieces from another well-known game. Both types are present in the list I came up with:

Color of pieces
Color of spaces
Horizontal/vertical moves, vs. diagonal
Matching vs. not-matching colors
Type of piece used (5 or 6 “kinds”)
Edge & limits of the board space
Squares shapes, 4 corners, etc.
Relative frequency of pieces, some in 8’s, others doubled, some unique
Adjacent placing of pieces
Rows & columns/ranks & files
Capturing pieces, also promoting
Gambits, or concept of sacrifice play
Point-based worth of pieces
Differing movement/capturing styles

I'm not sure yet if listing what I'm able to see as tools to play with in chess will be useful, but I haven't returned to design on this game since writing up the list. There's a few things I've tentatively settled on... rooks, knights, & bishops will likely represent three types of heroes/approaches that have a rock-paper-scissors relationship, for example. How I'll make use of all that, I'm not sure yet.

Design space in chess.