My son stares at the board. I’ve slid my rook to corner his closest pawn. He wavers over his zombie for the briefest moment, before manoeuvring and taking my rook with his skeleton.
My son’s obsession with chess has waxed and waned since he started playing – and teaching me – the game, around this time last year. Lately, however, this interest has resumed with a passion, and with it several novel adaptations to the game itself.
On one inauspicious evening some weeks ago, I managed to beat him twice in a row. The only way my wife could mollify his distress was gifting him a book named, with pleasing specificity, How to Beat Your Dad at Chess, which he’s been poring over every night since. I’ve not read it – my own dad doesn’t play, so I don’t feel the need – but I presume it doesn’t have a chapter on swapping out the individual pieces for Lego Minecraft figures, which is the current mode of play I am beset with.
It’s my own fault, since he’s wanted a proper Minecraft set for ages. We did buy him one once, but the pieces had been so badly 3D-printed they were incapable of standing up on their own, and so hastily packaged that they came nobbled with sticky-out bits of thermoplastic resin around the areas where they’d been cut from their moulds.
Charmingly, the laborious task of cutting the little nodules off one-by-one resulted in razor-sharp edges where once those lumpy plastic had been.
Better parents would probably have taken stock of the stumpy detritus they now held in bleeding fingers, and taken them as a signal to buy the second-cheapest Minecraft Lego set available in the western world, but the moment passed. And he reverted to our traditional chess set.
That was, until last week. Surveying his extensive selection of Minecraft minifigs, he decided to improvise. For pawns he chose, quite obviously, individual heads, removed from bodies and providing a size and uniformity that earmarked them as the lowest-ranking pieces on the board.
The king and queen, too, followed arelatively straightforward logic that even I could parse, with the game’s lead characters Steve and Alex standing in for their gendered, respectivelyregents. Then, things became more opaque. Skeletons were enlisted as knights on the somewhat spurious grounds that they occasionally ride horses in the game.
Creepers became rooks, because my son felt their rampaging straight-line action comported well to that of said castle-shaped piece. Finally, zombies were recast as bishops, purely because they were the only remaining characters he had two of. The end result is that I haven’t a clue who or what I’m playing against at any point in any game.
‘Which piece was that?’ I ask, as his skeleton takes my rook. ‘The knight!’ he says, before reaching for the written record of his new game pieces that he drafted a few days ago. ‘I don’t want to see the list!’ I splutter, with rather less decorum than is respectable.
Having now gone a week without a win, I can’t fault it as a winning strategy. My fate is sealed, the board reset. If anyone has a copy of How to Beat Your Son at Chess, I’m in the market.
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