Boardgame from the 80's...like chess, but different.

I'm racking my brain trying to recall the name of a game I had in the 1980's that was a little like chess. Hopefully one of you can help me out.

In chess, as everyone is aware, different pieces can move in different directions and patterns and so on. In the game whose name escapes me, all of the pieces were identical. It was the board that made the difference. The board was 8x8, just like a chess board, but each square had a different directional arrow or series of arrows on it.

When a piece is moved, it can only be moved in the direction indicated by the arrow(s) on the square from which it starts. Opponents' pieces are captured by running into them. So if the piece to be moved has a double-headed arrow that points "west" and "east", the piece may only be moved in one of those two directions. Or, if the piece to be moved has arrows pointing in all directions and diagonally, it may be moved anywhere. If a piece resides in a square that has arrows pointing "north" and "east", it may only move in one of those directions, and so on, and so on.

Has anyone else played this game? Do you recall the name of it? I'd like to play it again, so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

great game, btw.

But I don't what the name of it is.

othello is the one with the grid in which one player has the white side of tiles, and the other the black side, and it's played by surrounding the opponent's pieces so that you could flip lines of the pieces over to your color. That was an ugly description, but offered mostly to show that the game he's thinking of isn't othello.

It's All the King's Men, in case anyone was interested.

False alarm, downgrade the terra 'lert from orange to yellow.

Thanks, everyone.

You'd never see what was in a stack before you attacked, and then you'd have to fight a little mini-warfield battle with lots of 6 sided dice.

I first had thought of that one, but of ocurse, it isn't a grid, and it uses stacks, not pieces.

Damn fun game, though, especially after playing for a while and one has enough time to get some seriously nasty bad ass creatures.

I used to dream of so many AH games turning into computer games. Sad thing that never happened, what with the massive fleeing away from turn based games we've seen over the last decade.

Video games are fun, but they've become too dominant. Leave no room for imagination.

Titan was great, all those wonderful AH wargames - Panzerblitz, anyone? - Wizards, etc. Friends and I, when we weren't playing roleplaying games, played the boardgames.

Fun!

I was into the WWII games. I was living near Pearl Harbor when I got hooked on WWII as a historical event. Those WWII games were great!

War in the Pacific was my favorite. Panzer Leader and Panzer Blitz were good too.

Was never very good at them. But the other ones, like Titan and Wizards, etc., I was good at, and enjoyed highly. I was never a good military strategist for boardgames, except maybe Risk. I did better with Games Workshop (I think it was),their big war games, which I can't remember the names of, but even then, not so good.

I know, I know - before the 80s.

Still fun!

I believe was the slogan. Had chesslike pieces (but had ninnies and numbskulls instead of the familiar fellows) and the board itself had squares marked with differently oriented arrows, so you could move only in the directions of a given square.

Anyway, it's a mighty cool game.

ok, found a link on it (they spell numskulls without the b).

http://www.chessvariants.com/other.dir/smess.html

Smess by Parker Brothers, if memory serves me.

I had a set once.

It was a form of "fairy chess", and several variations on it have been invented through the years. You may want to try your own hand at it!

--bkl

It usually takes me around ten minutes to post (multi-tasking, y'know) so I didn't see the other post on Smess. But the link was great, I saved the page and may put together a homebrew Smess of my own!

Thanks, Soothsayer!

--bkl

Just had to go to the closet to check. It's still in pretty good shape, for its age.

I Googled the name and found there were similar board games named Smess and Take The Brain.