{"id":10137,"date":"2024-01-04T09:02:20","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T14:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10137"},"modified":"2024-01-04T09:03:07","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T14:03:07","slug":"match-of-the-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/04\/match-of-the-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Match of the Century."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The World Chess Championship between Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky, the defending champion at the time, and American Bobby Fischer in 1972 was dubbed the \u201cmatch of the century,\u201d with Fischer winning after 21 games over 50 days to become the first American-born world champion in the honor\u2019s history. Now you can relive this matchup \u2013 sort of \u2013 in the two-player board game Match of the Century<\/a>, published in the U.S. by Capstone. It’s played with two decks of cards over a series of games to determine the champion. It\u2019s a clever, tightly designed game, but unfortunately it\u2019s very dry, and relies on a mechanic that both my opponent and I found very confusing. (My opponent was my father, who holds two master\u2019s degrees, spent forty-plus years as an electrical engineer, and is one of the smartest people I\u2019ve ever met.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each player has a small deck of cards that have two values, one for when the player is white and the other for when the player is black. Your hand size can vary from 5 to 7, and you also start each game by taking one to three pawns from the general supply. The board has four spaces for cards on each side, with a number from 1 to 4 in the middle row. The white player starts each game by playing one card to any of the four spaces on their side, and the black player must respond with a card. The cards\u2019 values are compared \u2013 the white player\u2019s card value for white against the black player\u2019s card value for black \u2013 with each side adding up to two pawns to boost their strength. The winner gains those 1 to 4 points shown in between the cards, while the loser gets to execute the action or power on their card. A game ends when all spaces are filled, or when one player has gained enough points that the other can\u2019t catch up. The winning player gains one match point; in case of a draw, each player gains one. The first player to six match points wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the game isn\u2019t from the same designer as the amazing two-player game Watergate<\/a>, it has a similar look and feel, with asymmetrical decks and cards that can be played in several different ways. Watergate remains one of the most thematic games I\u2019ve ever played \u2013 the effects of the cards tie so well to the characters and events from the actual scandal that I have always found it impossible not to get swept up in the story while playing, even though the actual third-rate burglary happened a year or so before I was born. Here, the theme doesn\u2019t quite work as well, in part because chess is a game itself, and the game we\u2019re playing here doesn\u2019t look like chess at all \u2013 cards are labeled as knights, rooks, and so on, but it has no bearing on how those cards work. I thought far more of Battle Line<\/a> or Air, Land, & Sea<\/a>, two fantastic capture-the-flag games, than of chess, and I thought Match of the Century suffered a little in that comparison as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The confusion came about because you keep any unplayed cards from one game to the next (and unplayed pawns as well), so you have to flip your hand over when a new game begins, so your white cards become black or vice versa. I can\u2019t tell you how often this screwed one of us up. Even if we both reoriented our cards, one of us would either play a card upside down (for the wrong color\/action), or we\u2019d play it correctly and then read the wrong side because of how they\u2019re oriented on the board. I understand the intent, and I don\u2019t see a better way to implement it, but in practice it was frustrating and detracted from the fun of the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The general reaction to this game has been very positive, and I think I\u2019m in the minority here. My dad and I both enjoy games and puzzles, but we actually called this one after seven games (he won, 4 to 3, with a pretty masterful parry to my last move on the fourth \u2018flag\u2019 of the last game) because it was dragging and neither of us was having enough fun to justify playing it to the end. I\u2019d much rather play Watergate, or even Riftforce<\/a>, another capture-the-flag game, both of which are published in the U.S. by Capstone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The World Chess Championship between Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky, the defending champion at the time, and American Bobby Fischer in 1972 was dubbed the \u201cmatch of the century,\u201d with Fischer winning after 21 games over 50 days to become the first American-born world champion in the honor\u2019s history. Now you can relive this matchup \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,537],"class_list":["post-10137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boardgames","tag-two-player-games","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10139,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10137\/revisions\/10139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}