Life of a pawn

When is a chess pawn not a pawn? When it’s a trading card.

In chess, pawns are everywhere (Because there are eight of them on each side, duh). The game starts with all of them in a row. Their movement is pretty much restricted to moving straight and capturing diagonally (For reasons unknown to me, but I guess there are explanations behind it).

Pawns also define the geography of the board. How a chess battle is fought is determined by the opening moves. Pushing your pawns up front in the the early game allows more maneuvral space for your other pieces and thus better control of the board.

What kind of gameplay would there be if the chess board starts out empty, and players have to lay out pieces in turn order? Every piece, to a certain extent, would be a pawn. Super-pawns, when the queen and rook could run around unhindered and actual pawns not exactly very useful in the late game.

“So what can we do about it?” asked Slade as we were conversing over late lunch. “We went through the cards, but we totally forgot about the board.”

In some way our game is like chess – the fact that it’s played on an 8×8 board. However there are some big differences, like the fact that the board starts out empty, and the fact that you’d have at least 40 random pawns to start with.

“OK, look at this,” I said, “We now have turn structure like chess, progression like any strategy game, and the customizing aspect like, um, something. What we now lack is…”

“Is…” John continued while massaging his temples, “I can’t find a word for it.”

“Synergy. We have strategy, but no synergy yet.” Bingo. “A pawn in chess is a pawn because it’s meant to be like that. It’s role is defined as blah blah blah *scribbles on paper*”

“You’re right so far, so what are we going to do about this?”

Moy, the artist and third person at the lunch table, grabbed a pencil and started to sketch. “What if… the ‘pawns’ in our game defined the terrain like this?” He shaded some grids. “We have field cards, right? Cards that give some effect to a certain number of grids. What if these pawns are like farmers; they ‘plow’ the board to lay fields?”

“You mean, like Dune?” I asked, getting excited about the idea. Dune was an old real-time strategy computer game by Westwood which had scary sandworms that ate your units (And God forbid, harvesters). It had one particularly annoying thing: You had to lay concrete slabs on the ground before you can build your buildings on it, else the building starts out damaged (which sucks).

“Nah, that’ll be too annoying. What I mean is *scribble sketch scribble* these creatures lay fields as they move… they leave a trail. So they actually define the terrain in early game, and since fields can’t be overlaid according to the game rules, there’s actually a fight for territory!”

“Sweet.”

“Sweet.”

By the way, you ought to try dark coffee with lemon juice. Very interesting drink.

Some related posts:

• Iris’s post about the comparison between Heroes of Might and Magic and Encephalon.
• Life of a Pawn II – Encephalon v2.1 by Slade – NEW!