TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Five Problems With Chess

Firstly, of course: many folks I like and respect love chess, and I’m happy for them and have no interest in persuading chess fans to like it less or want something different. But it’s not for everyone, and I’m one of the people for whom it’s not. So what I’m interested in is: what needs fixing to make it a game I enjoy? And if you did that, who else might enjoy it?

I am gonna call these problems problems, though, because it gets exhausting to say “possible areas where there’s scope to broaden or mutate its appeal to a different set of people, without wishing to detract from or disparage the great enjoyment many already draw from the game as it stands.” And because some of them, from my perspective, for players like me, with all the caveats above, seem incredibly fucking stupid.

1. Being exhaustive is exhausting

This is my main one. To be competent at chess – not even good – you need to at minimum check over every piece on the board, all the squares it could move to, what it could potentially capture, and what could capture it in response if it did so. There are 32 pieces on a chess board, and 64 squares. I just don’t have the kind of brain that can do that diligiently and hold all the results in its RAM, turn after turn, and so I endlessly slip up and leave an important piece vulnerable.

If you’re doing that regularly, you just don’t get to play actual chess. There’s no room in the brain to read your opponent’s strategy or formulate your own, you just have to spend every brain cell running a brute force search on “What can take what?” – and still missing shit.

I also just don’t enjoy that kind of mental work. It’s not juicy or exciting to me. And it’s so central to success: seeing two or three moves ahead is really just even more of that work – exponentially more. Whoever can do that better has such a huge advantage that any other strategic merits either player might have waft into irrelevance. The parts of the game’s strategy that sound interesting only really kick in if both players are at roughly the same move-crunching ability tier.

2. The early game is slow and boring

All your good pieces are trapped behind a wall of bad pieces, so you both have to spend a bunch of turns moving the bad pieces out of the way so the good pieces can fight. Having a ramp-up can be good, but because the initial board setup is the same for every game, there’s now just a known list of viable openings. Expert players do one of those, while beginners like me just have no idea how the specifics of all that awkward early un-jamming affects the very long sequence of moves that will eventually put important pieces in dominance or danger.

3. The pawn is a shitshow of clumsy balance changes

Oh my God. OK, so as far as I can tell, the pawn has always been fiddly all the way back to chaturanga, the game chess comes from. Unlike every other piece, it can move to some tiles only if they’re empty, and to others only if they’re occupied, and only if by an enemy. And unlike every other piece, one of their moves is directionally locked – every other piece’s move options are rotationally symmetric. It wasn’t until I tried to program this in my own chess game that I realised this is already three special cases, for the least exciting unit in the game. That would already have me going back to the drawing board of a game concept to see if there’s a more elegant way of hitting the design goals.

But then the history of the pawn reads like the patch notes of an incompetent game dev scrambling to appease a community without any conviction or guiding principles of its own.

• The pawn can move 1 square forwards if the space is empty, or capture 1 square diagonally forwards if the destination is occupied by an enemy. Weird and bad, but seemingly there from the start, so fine.
• In 15th-century Europe, it was decided the early game was too slow (agreed!), so the pawn should be able to move 1 or 2 spaces on its first turn. This is two more special cases: no other piece has range other than infinity or 1, and no other piece has different movement rules depending on their history.
• But there was consternation that now a pawn could skip past a position that would have threatened it under the previous rules. I can’t speak to how important this is, but the fix is the absolute nadir of fussy, awkward, unsatisfying game design: if and only if a pawn just moved 2 spaces on its last turn, and an enemy pawn (and only a pawn!) could have taken it on the intervening square, this turn and only this turn, that pawn may move to the square the original pawn would have been on, and capture it as if it was there.

FUCKING LISTEN TO YOURSELF! What the fuck are you doing?! That is blithering, dithering, baffling bullshit. It reads like a bad faith thought experiment you’d use to shoot down someone’s suggestion: “Oh, what do you want us to do, [that horror show of rule salad]?!” And I say bad faith because apart from the other 20 problems with this, there’s a much simpler solution that better addresses the stated problem:

• If the square in front of a pawn is threatened, it cannot move 2 spaces.

It’s still a special case, but it only takes one sentence to explain, chess already has other rules where threats prevent movement, and it doesn’t involve pieces capturing the imaginary history-ghost of a piece that could have been there in a previous version of the game’s rules for fuck’s cocking sake.

*deep breath*

I’m so angry about en passant.

4. Draws are common and draws are bad

That’s not great. It’s not as common at lower skill levels, but it still happens way more than it should. A draw is almost always a failure of game design: a 1v1 game implicitly promises a victor, when it ends in a draw the design could not deliver what it promised. Because chess can only be won by forcing an opponent into checkmate, or hoping they resign, it’s very easy for both players to end up with too few powerful pieces left to ever trap each other so decisively.

In fact, chess’s other string of embarrassing patch notes include an increasing list of rules about when you can force a draw to avoid the game just going on forever. The miserable outcome of a draw is actually one better than the infinite tedium many chess matches would otherwise end in. And it’s pawn movement you chose to patch?

5. Stalemate is a wildly stupid concept

All that draw stuff, above, is what I thought ‘stalemate’ meant – you determine no-one can win and it’s a draw. That’s not it! A stalemate is when one player, let’s say white, is left in a position where every move they can make would let their king be taken. Ooh, tough game design problem! Who can say who should win that game? Maybe a draw, maybe white wins, maybe it’s illegal to put someone in that position?

NO, idiots! BLACK FUCKING WON! Read it back to yourself! White is in a position where EVERY MOVE THEY COULD MAKE would lead their KING, THE PIECE YOU MUST NOT LOSE, to be LOST. That is check fuckin mate, mate, in everything but name. The concept of stalemate was absolutely introduced by a sore loser with a lot of clout when they found themselves utterly outplayed. “Waaaa, every move I could make would lose me my king!” THEN FACE YOUR DEATH, COWARD.

It comes, of course, from another bit of weird but normally harmless bullshit chess talked itself into: instead of ending when someone loses their king, it ends one turn earlier, when that’s the only possible outcome. Seems weak to skip the climactic kill of this whole charade, but I guess it’s the punch Ali never threw – fine. But somehow that got mutated into “It’s illegal to move your king into danger”. Why?! What’s the point of that rule? If you wanna lose, go ahead. You lose! You can already surrender a game, so it’s not like we’re preventing suicide.

The only material effect of this rule is that it allows rules lawyers who’ve forgotten the point of the game to talk themselves in circles until they declare something provably insane like “If you put me in a position where I’ll definitely lose my king, YOU lose the game.” That was actually the rule in 18th century England. In fact, all the examples I gave of laughably bad ways to handle this situation were real: 

Today, a stalemate is a draw. Baffling. Your game already has a chronic abundance of draws, you cannot afford to be lawyering legit victories into more of the worst outcome possible.

If it was up to me, a stalemate would count for more than checkmate. 1.5 wins. It’s the secret unlockable ending where you actually get to take their king. Maybe throw it at them.

Why are you telling me this?

Oh, I’m making a chess game in my spare time. It’s been in the back of my mind as a fun design exercise to try ever since Bennett Foddy suggested it in a GDC talk, and tinkering with it has been super fun so far. Design-wise, I wanted to thrash out what it is I’m trying to fix, at minimum, before I get into what kind of flavour and twists I want to add. 

What I have so far, a week in, does a pretty good job of alleviating 1 and 2. 3 is interesting, because obviously I’m ditching pawns in their current form, and removing them clarifies what their role is. The hole they leave is not specifically pawn-shaped, but what I fill it with will probably be recognisably equivalent. 4 is not hard if you’re not trying to please die-hards, and 5 is self-evident.

There’s also a 6, but it’s such a stretch to call it a problem with chess that I ended up deleting it from this post: I want it to be single-player.