Chess Dancing

Chess Dancing is a game about political maneuvering and romance between Regency Era nobles at a ball. The game is best played with groups between 3 to 6 players where all players work collaboratively to create the story, without any input from a GM. Each player will take on the role of a noble at the ball, potentially even the one who organized the whole thing, with their own goals and conflicting interests. Each noble is assigned a chess piece placed on a board to represent the ballroom.

Players are free to roleplay without having to take any actions, with the board acting as the core mechanic to resolve conflicts. Whenever a piece threatens another piece, the associated nobles also threaten each other. The players will take turns moving the pieces on the board based on chess rules as the narrative gets going. Each piece even gets a special ability to spice things up. The pieces also serve as a narrative guide as each piece represents a different role within a noble family. Use different colored pieces to represent different families.

That's all you need to know! Use the board to guide the narrative flow of the game, and to know how the nobles are moving around in the ballroom. The game is all about nobles who have nothing else to do than dance all night, and all the intrigue that happens between those. The mechanics are not meant to get in the way of the story you're telling together. The game is at its best when you're all physically moving around the room (or virtually in various voice channels), and referring to the board whenever you need to solve a disagreement.

I've iterated on the core mechanics of this game a few times, and released at least a few versions in various places, this is just one of those iterations. (You might have seen it in 2015's Threeforged game jam). Feel free to play with the idea, I don't own the idea.

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This game was originally planned for the "Shit Or Get Off the Pot: A Solo Game Jam", until I realized that the name meant games played by one person, not designed by one person! Faced with this massive mistake, I decided to run my own solo-dev game jam where I design and release 10 imperfect one-page Tabletop RPGs as a solo game designer in a month. Maybe that'll become a real jam one day!

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Feel free to share feedback or design ideas in the comment, I can't wait to read them. The game was created with the intent of releasing something, even if it's not as perfect as it could be. My goal is to release something this month, hopefully one of those games is up your alley.

Available files: Full colour Legal sized PDF and black and white Legal sized PDF version of the game.

Credits:

• Fonts are Fraternite and Slippery, for non-commercial use only.
• All assets have been created by me using public domain resources, links below.
  • Dancer image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dance#/media/File:Il_Ballo2.jpg 
  • Chess pieces: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_chess_pieces
  • SVG Dancers: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballroom.svg