A chess game that makes love not war

Paco Ŝako is a variant of chess by Dutch artist and designer Felix Albers. The basic rules for how the pieces move are the same as for chess, but there are two very distinctive differences: no pieces are ever captured and removed from the board, and two opposite pieces can unite into one piece and move together. With me so far? Good, it gets weirder and very interesting indeed.

Everyone who has ever learnt chess and played with someone better at the game has felt the pain of getting pieces picked off the board one by one, until the bitter end of inescapable checkmate. After all, chess is a game of killing your opponent’s forces and capturing their king. It is war, basically. When Felix, himself a chess player as a teenager, was about to teach his son the game of chess, he was considering alternatives to the war-like nature of chess. The idea developed into Paco Ŝako, a fully fledged new kind of chess game focusing more on collaboration than elimination. I met up with Felix in The Hague to learn the game and this is my review.

How to play and how to win

First things first: if you play games, your first question might be “how do I win?” Yes…