Contagious Dreams
June 1999
Keith Baker
USA

It was a grim day for Blue on the bloody fields of Bosworth. Green's rooks were in a commanding position. Red was in the mid-field position, and while he only had pawns, they covered a lot of the available space. Blue sighed and moved a pawn forward. The piece would soon be taken, but at least it would allow her to put down her Queen.

My main problem with Bosworth is the subtitle of the game: "BOSWORTH - The Game You Already Know How To Play". I've tried four times now to set people down with the board and the cards and told them to start playing. So far, no one's ever managed to figure it out.

But there is method to this madness, even if the title really should be "Less Than A Minute To Learn". The point is that if you know how to play Chess, you know how to play Bosworth. Imagine a tiny chessboard with only sixteen squares, along with four additional four-square "staging areas" along each edge of the board. Instead of having all of your pieces on the board at once, you begin the game with only four pawns. Pieces in this game are represented by cards, and your remaining forces are shuffled into a little deck and you get four of them. Each time you move a piece out of your staging area, you bring a new piece into play and draw a new card.

What does this mean? For a start, it is much less predictable than chess. You have all of the basic chess strategies involving setting up lines of attack and defense, but at the same time, you can never be entirely sure what pieces will be available to you - or, for that matter, what pieces your opponent will suddenly bring into play. Further, there are a variety of difficult choices to make - if you have your Queen in your starting hand, do you bring her out right away and try to dominate the board, or do you save her for a rainy day? A final point is that you can't actually lose until your King is in play - although the game adds one feature to encourage you to play your King early, namely that a King may capture its own pieces (which can, surprisingly enough, sometimes prove to be a useful ability). It is worth noting here that Bosworth does not quite use all the rules of Chess; check, in particular, is absent, so you are allowed to move your King into the path of death if you wish to do so.

Another unusual feature of Bosworth is the addition of the third and fourth player. In the two-player game, things are fairly straightforward; players begin on opposite sides of the board. In the four player game, players start on EVERY side of the board; chaos quickly ensues, and it can be quite an exciting time before things settle down. The three player game is perhaps the strangest option, with player three setting up two pieces on opposite sides of the board - the "midfield position". In our experience, this proved to be a difficult position to play, and proved vulnerable to pinning from the other two players with four pieces on either side of you - but it could certainly prove a challenge for an experienced player.

I myself am not a Chess expert. I know the basics of the game, but I don't think thirty moves ahead. As a result, I really liked Bosworth - it had enough strategy to keep my mind occupied, but at the same time it was unpredictable enough that I didn't feel hopelessly outclassed by chess-master Rob. In addition, the games I played all played out in very different ways; I wasn't left feeling like there was a perfect way to start each game, since a lot depends on your starting hand. In short, if you have any fondness for Chess, I recommend Bosworth - and hey, you almost know how to play it already.

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