You are a chess master living under the Evil Empire.
The secret police are worried your free thinking and long term planning skills will pose a threat to their control.
However, the good press of a World Chess Champion sure would distract from all those crimes against humanity they're committing!
Can you use your chess skills to block the secret police and run away from the regime before you're captured, king?
You have three scores:
Block
Goes from 0 to 10 points and starts at 0.
If you reach 10 points before you are captured or run away, the Evil Empire collapses and historians will skip over this awkward phase of your life.
Capture
Goes from 0 to 10 points and starts at 0.
If you reach 10 points, you are captured and suffer a fate worse than death
Run away
Goes from 0 to 10 points and starts at 0.
If you reach 10 points before you are captured, you run away and defect during one of your chess matches.
You have 4 skills that represent how good you are at a given phase of a chess game.
Click on the boxes below to distribute your 12 remaining skill points.
Your Rating is the number of skill points you have put into your skills. A rating can range from 0 to 16. Your maximum starting rating is 12.
You have two actions:
to try and escape
to lower your Capture score by 1 at the cost of lowering your Run Away score by 1
The game and flavor text are loosely inspired by the life of Alexander Alekhine, 4th World Chess Champion and a guy with an awkward answer to "what were you doing between 1940 and 1945". He said that he played for the Nazis under duress and that they threatened to harm him or his wife who was trapped in Vichy France. He is alleged to have penned a number of racist chess articles applying Nazi race science to chess. Historians debate his level of involvement with the Nazi government. He claims he tried to organize international matches as a way of finding opportunities to defect—plans which were unsuccessful.
Alekhine is one of many chess players and sportspeople in general who used international travel as a way of escaping brutal regimes and seeking asylum. Korchnoi, frequent challenger for the Chess World Championship, defected from the USSR in 1976 following a tournament in Amsterdam. Lev Alburt defected from the USSR and went on to win 3 US championships. The world of international sports is full of stories like these, and while Alekhine was the inspiration the scope is wider than him.
For the game itself, I used mechanics similar to Instruct for Canada which are inspired by the one-page RPGs of Oliver Darkshire. Players have three scores: "good", "bad", and "timer". As players take the main action, they randomly increase one of these scores and get one of three endings depending on which score reaches 10 first.
Block, Capture, Run Away makes two big changes: character stats and roll contests.
Character stats let the player customize their character and ultimately give them some control over the randomization. The total number of stat points is the character's Rating, and players can choose to start with a maximum rating of 12. There are 4 stats that are equivalent in terms of importance.
Roll contests are how the outcome of the main game play loop is decided. Each loop, we construct a random opponent whose rating is 9 plus the difference of 2d6 giving an opponent rating of 9 +/- 5. These rating points are then distributed randomly across the 4 stats. Then we go through each game phase with the player and opponent rolling a number of d6s equal to 1 plus their character's score in that phase. Highest sum of dice rolls wins that phase (draws are possible but unlikely). The player who wins the most phases wins the roll contest (draws are possible and likely).
The combination of character stats and roll contests gives players more agency and ability to explore the system compared to Instruct for Canada.