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Sure, I played chess here and there, but I never felt a love for the game — only for every other abstract strategy game that I encountered. Chess carried with it hundreds of years of history, and the game never clicked for me as it did for so many others, so I was happy to explore those other games and leave chess behind.
Decades later, my son Traver started learning chess at school and wanting to play against me at home or on the road or on an airplane's feeble online gaming system that allowed you to compete not against an AI, but only any fellow passenger who also happened to log on to play chess. I didn't enjoy the game, but he indulged me enough to play the games I wanted that I would sometimes play chess, too.
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Flash forward to SPIEL '18, and I discovered that designer Felix Albers would be at the show with his chess-like game Paco Ŝako, a game that unlike so many other chess variants sounded like a unique design that would suit my interests. Midday Sunday during SPIEL '18, with my walking-around time almost clocked out ahead of my final hosting session in the BGG booth, I finally made my way to Albers' booth to talk with him about the game and its history. In the end, he offered me a copy of the game and I made sure to pack it in my bag instead of shipping it home so that I could try it out with Traver during our subsequent trip to Florence.
Amazingly enough, we both highly enjoyed the game: Traver for what it is and me for what it isn't. In spirit, Paco Ŝako is very much like chess. Everything you know about the latter can be used to play the former — yet you need to know more, too, because Paco Ŝako isn't merely chess on a different board or chess with random elements or any of the other chess variants I've seen over the years.
No, the hook of Paco Ŝako is that the game replaces capturing with embracing. When you move one of your pieces to a space occupied by the opponent, you combine your piece with the one already there to create a new piece of sorts. This combined piece moves like your piece on your turn and like the opponent's piece on their turn. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh", and all that, except that the one flesh isn't permanent. If I move another of my pieces onto the space where this combined piece is located, then this new piece replaces my old one, which is free to immediately move in its normal way, possibly chaining another move if it lands on a space occupied by a combined piece.
Paco Ŝako — which is Esperanto for "peace chess" — expands the play space for chess, escaping the catalog of openings and strategies that kept me from being interested in that game. I never wanted to have to memorize openings, but to compete at any level against those who did, you'd have to do the same, which is why I bailed so long ago.
Now you can take your knowledge of how the pieces move, and play something recognizable, yet brand new. You even have more movement opportunities available given how one piece combos with another, giving you more to consider on your turn, both on offense and defense, and it's interesting to consider how the best way to defend yourself against an attacker — which is what the piece still is, regardless of the "embracing" terminology — is to fill their arms with someone else, making them unable to embrace your king for the win until they can first find someone else to take their place in the embrace.
I've played Paco Ŝako ten times so far, and I've been delighted by how well the game works and by how such a small change in the design has such a large impact on the gameplay and how each game evolves. All the pieces remain in play until the end of the game, yet they combine forces and change, giving you differences from the original chess such as having two bishops on the same color or a queen that doesn't stay put where you leave it, but in a non-random way, unlike so many chess variants before it. Kudos to Albers for not being afraid to tackle a game-design problem that many others have in the past and for finding a brilliant new way to play this classic game.
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