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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 1591822" data-attributes="member: 508">My sons and I play chess and a whole slew of chess-based variants, some of which entailed building our own boards (and sometimes the pieces as well).  These include:4-player chess (store bought): a standard chess board with additional rows of squares jutting out from the sides, making the board look like a large "plus sign."Hexagonal Chess (homemade board, based on a description and list of rules found in a book of games): the board is made up of hexagons instead of squares - black, white, and gray - meaning that a King in the middle of the board has 12 possible moves, making it much more difficult to force a checkmate; each player's army has 9 pawns and three bishops (one for each hex color).Knightmare Chess (store bought): a deck of cards that allow the players to do one oddball thing each turn while playing standard chess, like swap the positions of two pieces or turn the entire board 90 degrees and thus change the direction the pawns must go in order to be exchanged for higher pieces.Chinese Chess (homemade board and pieces, from a description in a games book): very different from standard chess: the pieces are arranged on the intersections of squares, not on the squares themselves; the King equivalent must stay within his "command tent" (a box of 9 intersections); there's a "river" running through the middle of the board; pieces include Elephants, Horses, and Cannons.Shogi, AKA Japanese Chess (homemade board and pieces, from a description in a book of games): very different, as the pieces are arrow-shaped and color coded not as to which army it belongs to but what piece it is (Kings are purple, Bishops blue, Rooks red, Pawns yellow, etc.), with which way the arrow's pointing the only indicator as to which army it belongs to; and captured enemy pieces are removed from the board and placed in your "hand," and at a later turn you can drop a captured piece back onto the game board as part of your army.Jetan, AKA Barsoomian Chess (homemade board, from a description of the game from Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Chessmen of Mars, a novel in the "John Carter of Mars" series): a 10-by-10 grid, with 20 pieces per army; the game is unusual in that the Queen-equivalent cannot capture enemy pieces (and if she is captured by the enemy, her army loses); a King-equivalent's army wins the game if he captures the enemy King-equivalent, but if anybody else captures the enemy King-equivalent, the game's an automatic draw regardless of how many pieces are still on the board (due to the loss of honor), making the King-equivalent a reckless fellow indeed as long as his army's losing (as he doesn'at have to worry about protecting himself from the enemy pieces as he';s perfectly happy with a draw at that point, whereas the winning army must still keep his King-equivalent safe from all opposing pieces); and there's no such concept as "check" - why in the world should you alert the enemy that you're about to capture the head of his army?Besides those, we also play the occasional game of Risk and Star Fleet Battles, and my wife and I enjoy Backgammon and Yahtzee.  Uno is popular when we have younger relatives over.Johnathan</blockquote>

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