Any Chess or Backgammon Players on the Forum?

[jhill9693]

I play both

 

[smstachwick]

I’ve been playing a little bit with some of my clients.

It’s never really serious, I allow them to take back bad moves and that sort of thing. Mostly it’s about developing more basic skills like turn-taking, attending to an activity, being gracious in defeat, utilizing working memory, taking others’ perspectives, exercising patience when others don’t know the rules, and (shame on me!) speaking up when somebody is trying to get one over on them. It’s not about who wins, it’s about what they learn by playing.

A few of the older ones will actually be able to talk strategy, identify when advantage is shifting, and make sacrifices.

But I’m basically pretending that dunking on a 6ft rim is a challenge. I don’t particularly care to get my pieces handed to me repeatedly by a more skilled player, I don’t see any competition or sport in that. If I liked that I’d tune into Padres games instead.

I learned to play chess, but never really enjoyed it. Its rules always annoyed me in regards to how the pieces move. More specifically, the rules seem to exist only to make the game more complicated and harder to play, not make the game more interesting, balanced, or playable.

I think it makes a bit more sense when you learn about the pieces and what they represent, or at least when you learn good ways to think about them.

For example, I think of the pawns as being infantry encumbered by a big shield, making it difficult to attack directly forward, except in a big shoving match. It does make oblique attacks pretty easy though, and of course they are forbidden to retreat.

 

[b.wieting]

Try lichens.org, great site. During covid I used it to hold a virtual tournament for our scout troop.