LarpChess

Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!

Chess played as a LARP (Live-Action Roleplay). Each piece is represented by a player with boffer equipment commensurate with their rank.

Pawns: duct-tape daggers

Rooks: full armor, warhammers?

Knights: swords and shields

Bishops: quarterstaves

Queen: full armor and a polearm or other powerful weapon

King: unarmed (touch attack of death)

These weapon allotments should probably be rebalanced.

• Everyone should probably get the same/similar weapons. The main differences in pieces should be movement capabilities, if the game is to be closer to chess. If that's not the goal, the pawns should still probably have something better than a duct-tape dagger against boffers.

Only problem with the game is that you'd need a lot of players for it, as well as a sizable grid so there's room on each square for combat. A lot of the strategy, of course, lies in deciding who gets to be which piece...

• No, we could just use a seperate square for the battle and just have the players come off of the board to fight. Would make the game more manageable.
  • We could just use string and use up the entire field between East and North the way West and South set it up a chess board one time. How big were those squares? Maybe allow fights to take up two squares if an adjacent one is empty? Restricting fights to within a prescribed space could add something to fight strategy.
    • The danger with using string is that people may trip over it while fighting. This has all sorts of nasty worst-case scenarios. Some kind of chalked outline would be better. I do think that the fighting arena should be limited, though perhaps not small per se. After all, if you move too far from your position on the board, you've ceased to defend it and your opponent deserves to own it, no? Thus there's an incentive to stand and fight.

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Sounds like fun. Would someone let me know if it ever gets played? -- KatieLewis

• I agree. Do we have enough players/boffers to do this? -- ArthurHall
  • I volunteer my skills. It sounds like fun. --DuctTapeGuy