Manufacturer: Dogeared Games
Colour Chess and Lure are stand-alone games that can be combined, with adjustable gaming setups allowing for complexity to suit anything from young kids right through to Chess Masters.
In both games the premise is similar: use the colours to control and predict your opponent’s movements.
Each player takes two turns at a time, but on the first turn players must move onto the same colour tile that their opponent moved onto on their last turn. This allows you to bait pieces, force movement and control certain colours on the board.
Strategies and skills learned through traditional Chess are directly applicable to Colour Chess, but you must learn to incorporate the use of colours in your strategy and adapt your skills to a new board every game.
There is also a strong emphasis on creativity and exploration, whether it is in the construction of the board, the different pieces and game modes you can combine, or how to escape a seemingly impossible situation!
In the Box
A whole host of modular components allow you to build all manner of board sizes from little puzzle style games, right up to oversized 9×9 or 10×8. With more than one set there is no limit to what you can make! (Oversize boards play particularly well with Swarm variations where many pieces move at once).
- 32 Traditional Chess Pieces (flippable for Swarm variations)
- 24 Lure Pieces (also flippable)
- 84 Coloured double-sided Tiles (40 x 40mm); coloured on the front and light / dark on the back
- 20 Frame pieces for making different size boards and holding everything snugly in place
- Full colour Game Manual – 28 pages of instructions, variations and diagrams (most of it is variations and game setup ideas, you only need to read a few pages to start playing!)
Setting up the board
With two of you placing the tiles, you’ll be ready and playing in a minute or two (unless you’re busy making pretty patterns!)
There are 3 distinctly different ways of setting up the game:
Randomised
The quickest way to get started – just place the tiles in randomly and you’re ready to go!
Patterned
Create a patterned board to battle on. What will you come up with?!
It’s not just for looks either, patterned boards create very interesting games!
The board below for example will create strong clustered play, with pieces defending or transferring between zones. At the start, White has no moves onto purple whilst Black has no moves onto red; both players will have to carefully choose their opening moves to create opportunities on these colours and prevent themselves from having forced or missed moves.
Competitive
For advanced play, players will build the board from scratch between them, trying to place colours in a way that will complement their playing style.
Taking from a shared supply of visible tiles, players alternately play a piece anywhere into the board: they must play either into a corner space, or edge to edge with an existing piece.
As you are able to play tiles anywhere, you must balance developing your own structure with interrupting that of your opponent.
