No Stress Chess from Winning Moves is a chess game that comes with a deck of cards that help you learn how to play Chess.

The rules include several levels of mastery, which mirror what I see as levels of game worth in the world of board games.

In the first level, you flip a card, and that’s the piece you can move. The first to take off his opponent’s king wins. This level is simply to learn how the pieces move.

The next level includes holding a hand full of cards, which is seems like a chess version of the game Battle Cry. It’s not exactly Battle Cry in that in BC a piece on the left flank really can’t hit the right flank, while in chess many of the pieces can cross the entire terrain in one go. Here you’re learning strategy, but limited to the piece combinations you can actually achieve.

One or two additional levels remain until you get up to full chess mastery. I have no idea if this teaches good chess, but comments indicate that younger kids enjoy playing and progressing through the levels, and so end up playing regular chess, eventually.

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Conversation cards have seen use since well before Jane Austen* came on the scene, and they’re still around. You can pick up boxes of cards on different subjects from Table Topics. While not strictly a game, they can easily be turned into one by stealing the mechanics from Balderdash, Wits and Wagers, or Family Feud.

Particularly practical are the versions that come on napkins, which could be useful at a party when you’re sitting with a bunch of strangers.

* Actually, the game called Conversation Cards that Jane Austen played would have been a slightly different party activity: if I’m not mistaken, each player got several cards with words on them and you had to construct a story.

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Paul Newman passed away at the age of 83. One of the greatest actors and philanthropists of his time, I remember him best for some of the best movie gaming scenes ever made:

• The Hustler / The Color of Money – The two definitive billiards movies, TCoM is one of my favorite movies of all times, with wall to wall gaming quotes: “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.” “For some players, luck itself is an art.” “The balls roll funny for everybody, kiddo.”
• Cool Hand Luke – “Take a buck.” After “losing” a fight, Paul’s character plays in a poker game where he gets his nickname. “Yeah, well, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – The opening scene is a tense poker game, where Sundance (Robert Redford) is accused of cheating before Butch (Newman) walks in from behind and calls him by his name. His accuser suddenly changes his tactics. “I didn’t know you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheating.”
• The Sting – A slew of great games are played, including cribbage and poker. “-Your boss is quite a card player, Mr. Kelly; how does he do it? -He cheats.”

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BattleLore Boxed Set

Fantasy Flight Games has posted their new BattleLore site and its a bit on the underwhelming side.  The site has the rules in PDF form and links to buy all of the products that Days of Wonder had previously released.  Not much else, though they have created a new forum for the game that is amazingly active.  Hopefully we’ll see a bit more from FFG as they fully absorb the line over the next month or so.

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The Shropshire Star (UK) mentioned today the upcoming release of a revised Dungeons & Dragons board game. I can find no information about it on the Wizards web site or any other source. But whatever it is, head over to the newspaper’s web site; they’re giving away 20 copies.

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