A doctored image from The Queen’s Gambit. Harry Beltik hands Beth Harmon a book titled Fake Chess. — A fake image promoting **Fake Chess**.

Board Games | Society

Vladimir Putin and Elizabeth Homes are ‘Fake Chess’ Players

Fake Chess: Book of Champions

Oscar

Published in

The Ugly Monster

4 min readMar 8, 2022

We are surrounded by Fake Chess players. Our fake-it-til-you-make-it society encourages people to appear more awesome than they really are. This helps them gather the resources they need to win whatever game they’re playing. Then they can show the world how awesome they were all along.

Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress. Billy McFarland, the Fyre Festival guy. Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos. Donald Trump, a fucking reality show host. All of them seemed more successful then they really were, at least to some people. But Sorokin was broke, McFarland couldn’t produce even a small event, Holmes’ machine didn’t work, and Trump is only good at stealing money and dodging lawsuits.

Fake Chess: Book of Champions is one of the 493 games included in the ‘TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas’ bundle. To call it a chess variant would be inaccurate. You do play it with a traditional chess set, but that’s were the connection to real chess ends.

A interior spread from Fake Chess. The left-hand page says Game B: The Child Prodigy. Under that is an 8 by 6 grid filled with chess piece icons. Some are surrounded by shading, some aren’t. Several have been ex’ed out, presumably during a game of Fake Chess. The right-hand page has list of Actions and Fancy Moves. — A board, and Actions and Fancy Chess Moves for the Child Prodigy in **Fake Chess**.

“Fake Chess players use a very basic set of…

Board Games | Society

Vladimir Putin and Elizabeth Homes are ‘Fake Chess’ Players

Fake Chess: Book of Champions

Written by Oscar