Ms. Scarlet: Looks at the printed Wikipedia page and attempts to make one of the chess variants.
Where the heck'd this printer come from.....
Huh, somebody is printing out a list of alternate ways to play chess. She skims the list. Lots of them need alternate boards or pieces... but some are just alternative rules you can play with a standard chess set.
The Bishop sidles over and reads over her shoulder. Whatcha lookin at it asks. Scarlet shows it.
Huh, it says. Oh, cannibal chess looks interesting, anyone could become any other piece. I could be a queen.........
Scarlet says I wonder if we could set up a chess game that worked by some of these alternate rules...... how did you guys determine what rules your game worked by?
The Bishop says iono, everyone just kinda knew. And you could kinda do whatever you wanted anyway, if you broke the rules....... except when I was captured I did kinda go off the board on my own, I didn't have to walk off.
Scarlet says so to some extent the rules are like, cosmically enforced, but you could break some of them too?
The Bishop thinks about this.
It says yeah, in theory I think any of us could walk around on the board the way we walk around off of it, if we thought to do it? And if we were brave enough. And pick each other up and jump on top of each other and so on. But then there are special chess things, like capturing - and castling, I saw our King castle - that we could do because we were on a chess board....... and a while back the White Rook tried to capture one of us when we were all meeting up in the mansion, and it didn't work.
Scarlet says so maybe the rules of the board you're on can add capabilities while you're standing on them, or while you're part of the game, but can't take capabilities away except by mutual agreement to abide by the rules...
Scarlet says so possibly if we set up a game of a chess variant somehow, we could create a space within the mansion where we could do new things........ I don't know how useful it would be, and we still don't really know what makes one set of chess rules correspond to one chess board, but....... I want to understand what the fuck is going on. Or more of what's going on. And fucking around and seeing what happens might give us hints.