Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who by David M. Ewalt Read Free Book Online

“I know the moves, Michael.”
    “Show me.”
    It turns out I didn’t. I understood the basics—a king moves one space in any direction, a bishop moves any number of spaces diagonally, and so on—but had no idea about conditional moves, which allow pieces to behave differently in special circumstances. The pawn, for instance: I knew that on their first move they can advance one or two spaces, on subsequent moves they only advance one, and they can only attack the two spaces diagonally ahead of them. But I didn’t know about en passant capture. If a pawn’s initial move carries it past an enemy pawn, the enemy can attack backward “in passing,” taking the piece from behind. I learned this one the hard way, when Michael took my queen’s pawn on the sixth move of the game. I was defeated in about two minutes.
    We reset the board and tried again. Michael began by moving his king’s pawn up two spaces. I selected a pawn at random, the one in front of my queen’s bishop, and moved it forward two spaces.
    Michael scoffed. “You wanna play Sicilian? You wanna be a little bitch? I was just gonna teach you something, but if you really want to play . . .”
    “I don’t know what Sicilian is.”
    “The Sicilian Defense. It’s actually a great opening, but you don’t know that.”
    I’d heard of openings, but I imagined them as complex battle scenarios requiring the memorization of dozens of moves. Openings are why I’d been intimidated by chess: When I hear “Sicilian Defense” I think of the scene in the movie WarGames when a military supercomputer simulates hundreds of variations of global thermonuclear war. Their names flash across the huge NORAD monitors: CZECH OPTION. MONGOLIAN THRUST. DENMARK MASSIVE. SUDAN SURPRISE.
    But it turns out the Sicilian Defense is as simple as it gets: Two pawns, two moves, two spaces. It’s not a heavily choreographed war plan, it’s just a smart way to begin a match—the equivalent of choosing the center square in a game of tic-tac-toe.
    Of course, there are lots of openings, some of them much more complex. But none of them require rote execution. “The reason why you learn them is not to play the same way every time,” Michael said. “They teach you how the game develops, to understand the principles. You start a game with an opening, but you don’t have to memorize every possible response. Ideally, it’s just you and me and a battle of wits, and there’s nothing you can memorize.”
    He picked up one of his knights and hopped it forward over a pawn. “See these four squares?” he asked, pointing to the center of the grid. “The board is a mountain. This is the peak of the mountain. You are always going for these four squares.” He took one of my knights and mirrored his move, and then took his own bishop and slashed it across the board.
    “That’s the Spanish Game. For the next hundred years or until you get good, whichever comes first, play that opening. With this, I can teach you how to beat ninety-five percent of all chess players.”
    Over the next four days Michael gave me a dozen ten-minute lessons, popping in my office whenever he felt the need to procrastinate. I spent my free time browsing YouTube videos of common openings—the Giuoco Piano, the King’s Gambit, the Dragon Variation. And before long, I reached a critical realization: Despite its origins, chess isn’t a war game, and the goal isn’t to kill all of the other guy’s pieces. It’s a space game, and the goal is to control the board. War without bloodshed.
    Then I got cocky and decided to put my new understanding to the test. I challenged Michael to a real match: No advice, no holding back. I knew I would lose but thought I could put up a respectable fight.
    Afterward, I asked Michael for an appraisal. He was blunt. “Your game has improved significantly. But you still fucking suck.”
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    Today’s chess players use essentially the same rules as their counterparts in the fifteenth