Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Boom & Zoom

Throughout my life, from my childhood until the present day, I've had brief, intense periods in which I became obsessed with chess. It's an irresistible compulsion, the gaming equivalent of pon farr. After a few days or weeks, the fever passes. This waning of my sudden affection is helped along by the fact that I've always been pretty rubbish at chess. I've no head for playing competitively nor competently.  I'm a much better fit for backgammon, a game I came to late in life, but deliberately and by choice. That is to say, at an early age, someone decided I...

The first time I played Ty Bomba's Boom & Zoom, I opened with the equivalent of "1. e4", attempting to contest control of the center of the board: In Ty's notational system for this game, that'd be 1. 3T e1-Z-e4: that is, the three-piece Tower (3T) in e1 zooms (Z) to e4. Since each tower can fire (or "Boom") in eight directions, zooming to e4 would allow it to exert pressure on the maximum number of squares. This greatly restricts where my opponent can safely move, because there's only a handful of squares on their side of the board that...

Throughout my life, from my childhood until the present day, I've had brief, intense periods in which I became obsessed with chess. It's an irresistible compulsion, the gaming equivalent of pon farr. After a few days or weeks, the fever passes. This waning of my sudden affection is helped along by the fact that I've always been pretty rubbish at chess. I've no head for playing competitively nor competently.  I'm a much better fit for backgammon, a game I came to late in life, but deliberately and by choice. That is to say, at an early age, someone decided I...