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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.
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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