Chess

Chess.

More than just a fabulous musical, and arguably more than just a game.  Well, actually, plainly more than just a game, as mentioned in the previous sentence, it’s also a fabulous musical.  It takes a few minutes to learn the basics of the game, then a few more to learn how the knight moves, then some more to learn about castling and en-passant.  Basically it takes about forty, forty-five minutes to learn the basics of the game, but a lifetime to master.  That’s why chess is so popular in prison.

Chess is a game of strategy.  It’s actually the game of strategy and don’t ever let any tosser with a games console and a strategy-‘em-up tell you differently.  His (it’s always a ‘his’) new game set in a distant magical kingdom does not, despite the guff on the packaging and several hysterical broadsheet reviews filed by sleep deprived nerds, ‘have the complexity of chess’, although I can quite believe it has ‘the epic scope of the finest of fantasy novels’ and ‘female NPCs with really huge boobs’).

Chess requires you to think many moves ahead.  There are a finite number of openings, and established strategies, and end games tend to be relatively simple too, iso t’s in the middle where the drama is.

Chess, unusually for a board game, frequently ends in a draw or, when played between siblings, a fist fight.  As well as mastering the strategy and tactics, you also have to compete with the smug tosser on the other side of the board, smirking every time you make a move, which is exactly the sort of behaviour that will bet you into trouble on ‘C Wing’, by the way.

The other fabulous thing about chess is the variety of chess sets.  Even the simple ones are things of beauty.  I have an old (not antique, not valuable, just ‘old’, c1970s) travel chess set.  The board has little holes in it and the chess pieces slotted into it like pegs.  In the 1980s these sorts of chess sets were replaced with magnetic sets with the different pieces printed on little magnetic tiles.  Now, it’s probably an app.  Pah.

Once you start playing, you start to accumulate chess sets.  Although, oddly, new kit does not improve performance.  You need to get a robust one if children are learning, as the pieces have to be tough enough for handling by kids, but not heavy enough to do any lasting damage when they are used as weapons to augment the aforementioned fist fights that result from use of the word ‘checkmate’ in an enclosed environment.  You also get a really, really nice one that you plan to get out when playing with friends, but actually won’t let anyone else touch.

You even start to tinker with making your own.  This usually happens around seven in the evening on Christmas Day, when you have accumulated enough champagne/cava/prosecco corks to serve as Kings, Queens, Bishops, Rooks and so on, and enough bottletops of various colours to make pawns.  Board?  Back of a Cadbury’s selection box and a sharpie and you are good to go.  Warning, if this set is not assembled, painted and varnished by 27 December, it will be ‘tidied away’.

Oddly, the most charming chess sets tend not to be the ornamental, onyx, marble, ebony and Swarovski affairs that decorate the living rooms of the apartments of oligarchs’ tarts (although given the fate of some oligarchs, a nice chess set would be handy in their cell), but the ones with history.  This includes, let’s be clear, the Lewis chess men, but more often are the modest but beautiful sets one finds in what used to be known as ‘junk’ shops but, thanks to the proliferation of programmes featuring bargain hunting antique experts on daytime telly, we must now refer to as ‘curio emporiums’ or something.

These are objects that are loved.  Battlefields rightly become places of pilgrimage, a square of turf where sacrifices were made, deeds noble and ignoble done, where history was made, heroes crowned, villains vanquished.  The same goes for that small square chequered battlefield.

Also, you can get Star Wars chess sets!  How cool is that?