FORUM.TERMINAL_LEVY

Radha and Lord Krishna playing chess in a garden pavilion

Anybody else into this classy little board game? I've been playing online chess for 5½ years, after picking it up during the summer of pandemic. As someone raised on tactical RPGs, it felt like coming home when the essence of the game really clicked with me. It's very deceptively simple when it comes to the initiative system and movement patterns, but it gels into a really thinky strategy game with a lot of tactical flair. I learned a lot of how one should approach the game mentally from educational YouTube creators like GM Daniel Naroditsky and WGM Anna Rudolf.

In December I played my first ever in-person chess event, an open rapid Swiss-format tournament. For my first over-the-board competition I'm pretty proud of how I did, 3 out of 6 points (10th out of 27 players).

I'm curious about people's histories with chess, and their perceptions of the game itself!

I've been curious to get back into chess (or shogi, I really like the respawning mechanics in that) for a while but for some reason I never really put in enough effort to actually do it. When I was a kid my dad used to make me play against him and I don't think I won a game in my life until I was in my 20s as a result, which kind of painted my feelings towards the game for a while, but these day it seems like a good time for the most part for a casual player.

I never really played chess growing up, but I like to think FFT and X-COM developed my 'moving guys around on tiles' cortex at an early age.
My forays into shogi have been fun. It's definitely a slower game without a piece as powerful as the queen, but the respawn and promotion mechanics are cool. I find the pattern recognition aspect a lot harder with just kanji differentiating the pieces.
The only thing stopping me from 100%-ing Yakuza 0 is getting good at mahjong and shogi.

Every few months I think i really want to get into Chess or Mahjong, but every time i think about it i feel like i don't have the brain capacity to focus on everything i already want....someday though...
Also my grandpa always destroyed me in chess. Idk if he was actually really good or if i was really behind but i do want to believe he'd destroy everyone he knew.
Also getting into a real competition/event sounds scary, really would love to experience something like that myself, be it chess or a fighting game.