Panglott's Garden: My First Dragonchess Set

Thursday, May 28, 2009

My First Dragonchess Set

About a year ago, I made a set with which to play dragonchess, the three-dimensional fantasy chess variant invented by Gary Gygax for a story in the 100th issue of Dragon magazine. I made the pieces out of polymer clay, painted gold and scarlet. Rather than copying the conventional Staunton chess piece design of the 19th century, I based the design on the original Persian designs that entered Europe at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

Although the first chautaranga pieces from India were representational, Islam's proscriptions against iconography caused the pieces of shatranj to assume a very abstract, nonrepresentational form. Since chess came to Europe through the Islamic world, the earliest Spanish, French, and Viking chess sets had more abstract shapes. I thought it would be an interesting variant—especially with my primitive sculpting skills. Also, I gave the pieces for the lower, upper, and middle boards different shapes (cubes, cylinders, and pyramids respectively) to help distinguish the pieces. The boards are posterboard and watercolor.

Rather than the 8x8 board of chess, dragonchess uses three 12x8 boards. Each player, both Gold and Scarlet, has 6 Slyphs, 1 Dragon, 2 Griffons, 12 Warriors, 2 Oliphants, 2 Unicorns, 2 Heros, 2 Thieves, 1 Cleric, 1 Paladin, 1 Mage, 1 King, 6 Dwarfs, 2 Basilisks, and 1 Elemental. That's 15 unit types and 42 individual figures, compared to the 5 unit types and 16 figures of orthodox chess.

I've played a few games of dragonchess since putting the set together. It is a very complicated game. Some of the pieces move similarly to orthodox chess; others move slightly differently; and nearly every piece that can move around the board does so in a different way. These moves are not at all systematic. It is confusing to keep straight the moves, blockable and unblockable and special powers of each piece, and it usually involves a lot of referring to the instructions.

Apparently Gygax didn't spend a lot of time playtesting this game.

The Lower Board...