In her art installation Orthogonal/Diagonal ,Los Angeles artist Nova Jiang uses 3D printed game pieces that have been designed to help new players intuitively understand several historical chess variants from all over the world.
Currently her installation consists of eight chess variants from countries like Mongolia, Thailand, Japan and Myanmar. These variants have deep historical roots in these regions and can vary quite a bit from the currently dominant version of chess that we are all familiar with.
We can find the earliest precursors to chess in India with a simplified version of the game called Chaturanga. It quickly spread to Persia where it began to resemble the modern version of the game and eventually made it’s way to Europe. By the 15th century The Kings Game as it was called had become the dominant form of Chess in the world, most likely as a side effect of colonialism. But many of the dozens of chess variants didn’t just go away, they remained regionally popular.
The reason chess had so many variants historically — in fact modern chess is simply a variant and not the original — was due to the popularity of the game concepts combined with the lack of reliable or inexpensive printing presses. This caused rules to be rather inconsistent, often simply being quickly explained by the merchant who sold you the game board and pieces. Many of these variants use the lines on the board to move rather than the squares, and often times seem almost unrecognizable in contrast to the game that we all know today.
The purpose of Jiang’s art installation was to attempt to create chess pieces that could convey their rules of movement and capture intuitively without the need of having them explained to you. By using different shapes, board layout and piece configuration Jiang attempted to create what is essentially a self-teaching board game that relied on our current knowledge of the basic game mechanics of chess.
New Zealand’s The Enjoy Gallery hosted Orthogonal/Diagonal and held a four hour chess tournament where visitors were encouraged to play as many different variants as possible. This gave Jiang an opportunity to observe if her 3D printed game pieces would really inform new players of the rules.
Jiang said that it turned out that rulebooks still needed to be provided to players in the beginning of the tournament. However she notes that very quickly the game pieces did end up acting as instructional aids for many of the players and served as reminders without having to look back at the rulebook. Jiang said that the tournament provided her with a lot of design feedback that she will include in future iterations of the installation.
