How Chess Can Be a Team Sport

Decades ago, I invented an educational game that resembled our complicated legal system.

Because of my experience with this game, I was excited by recent reports that chess has recently become extremely popular among young Americans.

Rather than inventing a completely new game, I had taken the basic rules of chess and added two complications, turning it into a team sport. (Thinking of chess as a sport may seem strange. But in the Soviet Union major chess matches were reported on the back page of Pravda along with more athletic games.)

The first additional rule allowed players to change a chess rule rather than moving a piece. There were limits to allowable changes. The most basic limit was that rule changes must apply equally to white and black pieces — analogous to the Equal Protection clause in the U.S. Constitution.

The second change was that a game would consist of seven chess boards played simultaneously, with one team playing the white pieces and the other team playing the black pieces. A grand strategist for each team could remove pieces of his team's color from one chessboard and place them instead on the same location — if it was empty — on one of the other boards.

There were limits here, too, including a rule that kings could not be moved to a different board. Unlike the games played on the individual boards, the grand strategists did not take turns but could go at it hot and heavy.

Thanks to different rule changes on the individual boards, rules on the receiving board could be different from those on the sending board, which complicated the job of the grand strategists.

This is analogous to the fact that state law differs from one state to another in the U.S.

Removing a piece from one board might make it harder for his player to win that board but help his player on the receiving board. The grand strategist's goal was to win a majority of the boards.

I used this game, which I called Perplexichess, in my Adrian College classes and in pre-law institutes for high school juniors that I ran for a number of years. We also used it once as evening recreation at a regional Michigan intermediate school math contest.

Once my class was playing Perplexichess when an admissions counselor and some prospective students looked in on us. The excited players were getting carried away, arguing, yelling and pounding the table. Afterwards, I apologized to the admissions officer, but he replied that the guests were impressed with how lively our classes were!

A key part of classroom use was discussion and analysis of the experience after each game, showing how Perplexichess illuminated politics.

Unfortunately, I had to stop using this game when fewer and fewer new students were familiar with the basic rules of chess, necessary background for playing it.

Perplexichess resembles the U.S. legal system in that it has rules (like our laws), but the rules can sometimes be changed (also like our laws). The rules governing the allowable changes were analogous to the Constitution, which places limits on the legislation that Congress can enact.

Another resemblance with our political system is that when rules get changed in Perplexichess, they do not always produce the expected benefits.

For example, if conservative members of the Supreme Court expected that overruling Roe v. Wade would benefit the Republican Party, they were surely surprised when it turned out that abortion rights provided effective election ammunition for Democrats.

Now that more youngsters are learning the basic rules of chess, it might be possible again to organize Perplexichess bouts. Perplexichess matches could make a good activity for chess clubs as well as political science classes, and I will gladly send rules and instructions to anyone interested.