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Ancient Game Of Chess Captured In Day-Glo Plastic
By bohus
How better to celebrate the austere and ancient contest of the minds that is chess than to release a version ready to go down to the disco? Calling it "disco" isn't accurate at all as this set was born in 1971 - same as me. Given the year, it's more psychedelia than Saturday Night Fever.
Kidding aside, chess is a great game. A game of kings, yet one accessible to anyone. Cheap plastic pieces put a chess set within any future Bobby Fischer's reach. Many masters started with just such a set - it's common practice to fill the hollow pieces of a cheap set to aid play. Yet this "World Of Family Fun" uses the clear plastic pieces as an appealing aesthetic asset. By molding the pieces in transparent funky day-glo colors (they call it "Crystalite"), you get a spacey set of chessmen that were probably still rather affordable.
We've said before that sometimes the most interesting time to inject style into an object is when it doesn't really need any. Do the new funky colors make this game more appealing to youth? I doubt it, but it really doesn't matter. Maybe this was some 70's kid's first chess set, and maybe this was the beginning of a lifelong love of the game. It's a great testimony to the centuries-old game of chess that it doesn't suffer at all through innumerable plastic permutations.
Idiot's Guide to Chess book on Amazon
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