Petteia – The Mother of Chess

Chess is the child. This is the Mother. Petteia is a strategy board game, and a chess game at heart, played on a 10x10 board, with ten pieces and ten pawns a side, and one piece that chess never inherited. Learn Petteia and something strange happens when you go back to chess. The board feels small. The lines feel short. Players describe chess getting easier, and it is not hard to see why: you have been thinking across a hundred squares, and eight by eight is a smaller room. What would it feel like to find chess easy? THE SNAKE: THE PIECE CHESS NEVER GOT Chess gives you two kinds of movement. The rook, bishop and queen slide in straight lines. The knight jumps in an L, and that is as strange as chess ever gets. The Snake is stranger. It does not slide and it does not jump. It winds. It travels outward along eight curving paths, each one bending as it goes, ending in squares that no rook,…