Arms Race: The Abstract Strategy Game

One day, when I was playing around with some dice, I suddenly made the connection: There are 6 sides on a die (duh), but there are also exactly 6 unique Chess pieces in Western Chess: Pawn, Rook, Knight, Bishop, Queen, King!

With that I went to work trying to invent a game that would work.

I came up with a game inspired by the Arms Race game mode in Counter-Strike (hence the name). For those unfamiliar, the core mechanic in Arms Race is that every time you kill someone, your weapon “upgrades” to the next tier. With every kill you become ever deadlier.

With that in mind, the rest of the core loop fell into place. Both sides start with only Pawns on the board. Every capture upgrades the piece to the next number. Each number corresponds exactly to both the point value (in Chess) and moveset of the next higher piece.

Thus, with each capture, the piece would not only get more powerful, but also more expensive to lose.

Eventually, a piece – with enough captures – would get promoted to a King, at which moment it would lose all momentup and effectively cause the game to end if captured.
With this wrinkle in mind, you’d need to be careful not to get over-eager capturing with just one piece, because doing so could get you in very hot water very quickly.

I originally posted this game idea on my blog: Shower Thought Games, and someone suggested giving it a dedicated page on BGG. I typed up a PDF and the rest is history.

To Play This Game

You need

  • For Arms Race
    • 6 white dice, 6 black dice
    • A 6×6 board
  • For Grand Arms Race
    • 16 white dice, 16 black dice
    • An 8×8 board

If you don’t like using regular d6 because the pips and points get mixed up, you can also pick up this set of Chess Dice from Triple S Games.

Links