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In the middle of self-recriminations about preparing stupid spells, Blai appears in a cemetery.
It's dark, so it takes him a Light spell to notice that it's a cemetery, but while the range of headstone styles is unfamiliar the spacing and the inscriptions give it away. It doesn't look super actively haunted, so it's not an emergency, but he keeps one hand on his holy symbol and one on his mace as he picks his way across the grounds, looking for buildings or something.
"My favorite requires four players, but most do not..." Voila, a book of chess variants. Perhaps she would enjoy this one.
"Not to ruin your fun, but I do need that book eventually," he says when he finishes and returns the latest one he's working on.
"I think we'll manage without it." She remembers the rules to hostage chess and can propose more variants as they go.
"There's one halfway between this and my favorite - my favorite has two teams, two boards, when the white teammate captures a black piece their black teammate can place it on their own board and vice versa, but there's a one-board two-player version where you can simply place a captured piece immediately, I'd just have to change the colors."
"Oh, I used to love a game of bughouse with the lads," Rupert says absently as he sets up the chess book in the widget.
"Is that a local name for it? The book calls it redeployment chess, either two-board or one-board as the case may be." (He's aiming for the sort of compromise Taldane he uses in situations where he's addressing a mix of Chelish and miscellaneous other people, since linguistically that is what is he is now doing.)
"Yes. Redeployment is certainly a more straightforward term. Perhaps the four of us could sit down to a game sometime after I emerge from my literary fugue."
"I would very much like that. But there is no rush, I'm only religiously obliged to have fun once a month."
"Only once a month, really? Seems a bit infrequent. I guess if it was once an hour there'd be serious concerns about scheduling."
"I do try to arrange it more frequently so that if there is ever a prolonged emergency I have sufficient slack."
He will be so well supplied. No danger of missing his monthly fun requirement around this crowd.
"I wonder what redeployment chess would look like if pieces were intimidated by the piece that last captured them? I guess that introduces a lot of extra information to track..."
"Hmmm, I could try imprinting a number on the side of each piece and then giving a redeployed piece a marking with that number to match? Or maybe a numeral would be too big at this size - colored dots, pairs of them so they could be unique?"
He assigns each piece a pair of dots on their sides and when they start getting captured they get their capturer's dots added on their tops. It's so much to keep track of and he loves it.
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