Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

“All Chess Goes To Heaven” is Nefarious and my latest chess variant (she named it), and makes bigger changes to game play than our previous experiments. For starters, it’s played with two boards. The first board (the Earth) is set up as normal, using either regular pieces, or in our case, your favorite fairy chess setup (we played with jokers, archbishops, freezers, canons, and bombs added to the roster). The second board (Heaven) starts completely empty. The goal of the game is to kill the opposing player’s king, with the caveat being that you have to do it twice — first on Earth, and then in Heaven.

When a piece is killed on Earth, it is transported to Heaven. It goes in the same position that it was killed in. However, if there is already a piece in that position, then the player that did the killing gets to place it anywhere on the Heaven board. The other way that pieces can go to Heaven is by committing suicide. When a piece commits suicide, they can be placed anywhere in Heaven. You can also kill your own pieces, but unlike suicide, it is treated as a normal combat death and they land in the same space they were killed in, unless it is occupied. Chess pieces all behave normally in heaven with the exception of pawns, which lose the ability to transform into queens upon reaching the other side, but gain the advantage of being able to move (and capture) both forward and backwards (although not sideways).

On your turn you can move a piece on either board, or you can have a piece commit suicide. If canons are being used, the canon ball is only transported to heaven if the canon is holding it when it is killed. If all the pieces of one color are in Heaven, and they have killed all the pieces of the other color that are in heaven, the player with pieces left on Earth is forced to transport (via suicide) one of their pieces from Earth to Heaven in order to reduce the chance of draws occurring. We haven’t had this happen, so this rule set might need some tweaking (as may others — Nefarious and I debated possible rules as we went along).

We’ve only played once so far, but it was a lot of fun, and the game takes a little longer. Strategy-wise it’s interesting because it adds new elements of planning in how you configure Heaven, as well as the obvious element that the losing player builds up a formidable advantage in Heaven (so if you have to take care to make sure you don’t put all your strategy eggs in one basket), but at the same time, the winning player, who will end up moving most of their pieces to Heaven by suicide, has a good chance at engineering a checkmate. This is how I won, but it was close, and I was a little worried as she built up a very solid set of positions. The freezers are very powerful as well in Heaven, and she’s quite good with that piece. Anyway, I definitely recommend giving this variant a shot!

The middle picture is her jumping on me and punching me like a berserker to celebrate a particularly clever board. I think she would probably like chess boxing.