I love Chess variants. The origin of this love is twofold. First, I adored the idea of “Martian Chess,” or Jetan, that Edgar Rice Burroughs in The Chessmen of Mars, complete with full rules of the game. Second, my father loved classic boardgames, including chess and chess variants. As a child he taught me Go, Checkers, Chess, and then Shogi and Xiangqi. When I fell in love with Jetan we played it for months (using tape to temporarily turn a Go board into a Jetan board), and he introduced me to Chancellor Chess, Checker-Chess, and a tone of other variants.

When Dragon Magazine published Dragon Chess, he and I used out multiple chess sets and many of my lead miniatures to make a set, and played. I don;t think we ever got through a whole game, but we made multiple runs at it.

(Somewhere in here I also found the…