Game Reviews: Mind Games, year 2006

Dragon Chess

• Replay Value (1-10): 6
• Fun Factor (1-10): 6
• Worth Buying (1-10): 4

It's a bit hard to evaluate how well this works as a game. The 12-space "side boards" seem out of place, almost as if they were added as an afterthought, but it does allow for more space for the added pieces.

Unfortunately, the rules with the game are pretty horrible. You get two pages describing the rules of standard chess (which, incidentally, can't even get the symbols for the king and queen to be correct) and one page that just gives the new starting layout and how the dragon moves. There are an annoying amount of unaddressed rules (how does castling work? What happens if a pawn gets stuck on the "side boards"? How does en passant work?) and quite a few strange inconveniences (it seems really hard to get your king to a safe position in the corner without hemming your dragons in, and with the extra two rows the pawns take way too long to be effective). My overall feeling is that whomever designed this game didn't actually give it any real playtesting -- or even did any research on existing work in the field. Compare this game with, say, Capablanca Chess and you'll realize that generating a larger chess variant is a lot harder than just creating a new piece and adding it in the superficially similar way.

If you want, you can also use the figurines to play a game of normal chess, so if you don't like the extra stuff at least you get a nice chess set out of the deal -- except that you'll have to turn the board 90 degrees or else the coloring of the square will be wrong.