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Noble Celts: Game Review. Review of commercial Chess variant set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Martha Merry wrote on Mon, Jan 19, 2009 09:31 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
It's too bad Ben Good didn't try a couple more games on the Noble Celts board. Yes, this board is challenging but the pros far outweigh the cons when it comes to game play. While the scope of movement of some of the pieces (especially the bishop) are intimidating at first, I found that within three games my mind had absorbed the board layout and, since I couldn't rely on any of the strategy of the square board (and neither could my opponent), I found it an exhilarating new way to play the old game.

Ron Hale Evans wrote on Tue, May 20, 2003 10:30 PM UTC:
As written in the Games Journal:

The Noble Celts Board

8x8 boards are easy to make or find, of course; you can probably buy a
cardboard checkers set from your local thrift store for about a dollar.
One rare bird of a board, however, is Noble Celts from Dream Green, the
folks behind the G8 Game Timer reviewed in The Games Journal a few months
ago and the card game systems 1-2-3 OY! and A-B-C OY!.

Noble Celts is a high-quality 8x8 board printed on heavy, durable cloth,
with black and white spaces marked for Chess -- but it's a board with a
literal twist. The geometry of the Noble Celts board has undergone an
Escheresque topological transformation. First, the square board was made
circular, as in Byzantine chess, then the board was redrawn so as to make
the connections between the spaces even more obscure.

You can in theory play any 8x8 game on Noble Celts -- Chess, Checkers,
Reversi, the games from the 8x8 competition -- but theory and practice may
diverge. I tried playing Reversi on the board, but after laboriously
puzzling out that the four central Reversi start squares are off-center
and halfway to the periphery in Noble Celts, my brain melted like a Dali
watch (in a good way). If you are a gamer and a geometer, however, as some
in my gaming group are, you might enjoy wrapping your mind around this
board. I'm certainly going to give it another try, but I'll keep the
ibuprofen handy. In a good way.

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