Back in 1990 I just happened to be looking at a chess board. I had played chess just a little when I was younger and was basically a pure novice with no desire to invest the time needed to get better. Anyway, since I was always looking for new games, I began studying the chess board. What if I could turn this into a circle somehow? So I imagined taking the regular board and twisting it into a semicircle that was centered around a smaller circle. Then by mentally drawing a line through the middle of both starting rows I imagined adding the mirror image on to the first semi-circle to form a complete circle. There would be 8 spaces in a row and 14 rows evenly spaced in the circle. Confused? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words! And I’ll post several pics below.
I drew the basic design on a computer and then wondered how the heck to play it! Well, maybe it would be easier with checkers instead of chessmen. Hmm, not sure about that either! So I decided to make a round chess board first and then make the rules later as I played around with it.
I ended up making two circular chess boards complete with custom designed chessmen and checkers. It was a huge task and took months to complete. The final result, though, is perhaps my best work as far as making gameboards go. To store the game pieces I made two maple wooden boxes that had a top and bottom half that would slide together on four pins. Two set screws were added in the sides to lock the box. They clamped from either side on two more pins in the middle. On the top of the box I engraved two boards, one set up for chess and one for checkers. I was very pleased with how they turned out!
However, I still didn’t know how to play either chess or checkers with circular boards. After doodling around with the boards, I wrote up some basic rules. They seemed promising! But then one day while looking at a Popular Mechanics magazine (or something similar) an image popped off the page and smacked me right between the eyes! There was my new chessboard being advertised for sale!! I was devastated! Apparently someone had obtained a patent on the board a couple of years sooner. The ad didn’t mention playing checkers with it, but it didn’t matter to me. I moved on to other projects.
To this day I cannot find the rules I had written for the games. Now, some 30+ years later, I decided to Google “circular chessboards”. I found only one board that looked like mine and it was dated 1988. It was the same board I had seen advertised many years earlier in a magazine. Sadly for the inventor, they no longer make the boards.
Even though I have no rules or directions for my Chess and Checker boards, I decided to include them on their own page under Board Games. Maybe someone will write their own rules one day!
Either bored or having too much fun!
Sir GAR smoking Ci GAR