tschess (itch)

Life is hard and mistakes can cost you dearly. This is the reason that humans and animals play, to practice critical life skills in a safe environment. If the definition of intelligence is the ability to get what one wants, few skills make one more intelligent than that of strategic thinking. As a conduit to developing a keen mind for strategy chess has existed as a fundamental form of play for hundreds of years.

Opening theory is the name given to the traditional sequences of starting moves that define all chess games at the higher levels of play. This field of study has advanced to the point where master players commit entire trees of contingencies to memory before the start of a game, with the title going to the one more willing to cram their mind full of minutia. Rote memorization is arguably the least useful skill one might acquire, in an age when any fact can be looked up almost instantly online.

Chess died when it transitioned from imparting life’s most useful skill to its least useful one.

Enthusiasts of the game will resonate with this dismal state of affairs, but fortunately for them we have good news. The developers at Bahlsenwitz LLC have Lazarus-like breathed new life into the empty husk of this once proud game, their creation is called tschess and is available now in the App Store and Play Store alike.

Aware of the deficiencies of traditional chess Bobby Fischer the American grandmaster and 1972 World Champion began working on a means of salvaging the most compelling elements of the game. Known as Fischer random chess, or Chess960, this game uses the same board and pieces as traditional chess, however the initial configuration of the pieces on the players' own back rank is randomized. While the random setups eliminate the ploy of advantage gained through rote memorization, it is at odds with the notion that human action is consequential.

The creators of tschess adhere to the Thielian concept that “you are not a lottery ticket”, that randomness is not the defining characteristic of life. In tschess, rather than beginning the game with an assortment of random pieces the players can premeditate the disposition of pieces on the back two ranks. Taking pawns to be worth one point, bishops and knights to be worth three, rooks to be worth five, and queens to be worth nine, a standard board has a total value of 39. With that as an upper bound, tschess players can organize their back two ranks however they see fit, this could mean for instance, four queens and one knight, or all bishops (leaving two of the squares empty), or anything in between!

The resulting game is faster paced, having dispensed with the courtship seque of well known openings, we can get immediately to the action, as both players begin by seeking to execute their premeditated plan, while coping with the surprising new disposition of their opponent.

As humans we’re resistant to change, we hold an undue reverence for the things of the past. The original creators of chess weren’t gods, they were human like you and I, while it’s true that they had many admirable traits they were likewise subject to the same foibles that we experience in our daily lives. To refrain from adapting their creation to better suit the circumstances of today is a disgrace to their legacy and the spirit out of which chess was born. Chess is dead. Long live tschess.

That said, we encourage you not to take our word for it. Try it out for yourself! Available on Android and iOS.