Zolt Chess: a Chess and Playing Card Game

Zolt Chess: a Chess and Playing Card Game

The great future-telling students of the Mystic Medium Zolt Olaf enjoy a game of chess as a test of skill and mental training. They have developed their own variant over their years of tutelage, making full use of their psychic abilities to enhance the game. Each round they pass a psychic dampening helmet between them, training in the ways of skill and precognition. We have taken this game and produced a version that simulates this, for those of us who are less psychically endowed.

Zolt Chess is a two-player chess variant played with a chess set and standard playing cards. Each player holds the King, Queen, Jack and Ace of two suits, and each card moves different kinds of pieces. Every round, one player commits three cards face down and the other uses their latent psychic powers to predict and outmove them.

Notes from the Designer

We all have patterns as game designers (or creators in general), and I feel like I'm in a unique position, having published so many games (42 issues and counting!) in the same medium of standard games. As such, I'm picking up on various patterns that underlie how I see certain games and certain design tropes.

So far I've published three chess variants: Zolt Chess, Alchemist Chess, and Tectonic Knights. The through line across these is that I seem to take something magical and integrate it into chess in some way. For Zolt Chess it is precognition, for Alchemist Chess it is alchemy (of course), and for Tectonic Knights it is geomancy.

I've reflected a bit on why I think this pattern has emerged, and I believe it's due to the historic context of chess and my associations with it. Firstly, chess is quite old, dating back about 1,500 years to its earliest versions (Chaturanga from India), and it uses titles more associated with the past (kings, queens, knights, etc.). This means I naturally associate it with past settings, whether historic or fantasy. Secondly, chess is associated with intellectual competition, even in modern times, such as the USA/Soviet sparring during the Cold War.

I think these two associations, historic and intellectual competition, make it easy to arrive at magic/mystic competition themes, as intellectualism is often tied to mysticism, especially in historic contexts.

So what do you do with the information that you have a game design pattern? For me there are two equally valid choices: either lean into it harder and make it a niche, or shake it up. In this situation my niche is already making Standard Games, so I'm going to opt to expand my horizons next time and really shake it up with the theme. I already have a wide variety of themes in my non-chess variant games, and I love hybrid themes, so I'm sure there's something interesting I can do here.