Express Chess
There are several chess variants that are played with cards and without board. In these variants, the cards form the board. I am the happy owner of a set of Chex, a small box with cards with the symbols of the chess pieces on it. Related games are the game Tile chess by Steve Jackson game, a well known US game publisher and the recently (2011) released German game Schachen (Chess me). Express Chess is another member of the same family. This commercial game was released in the US in 1996 by a company called Blackbox. The game is currently no longer for sale.There were actually four sets of Express Chess cards. Each package contained a number of cards with a picture and a chess symbol on it, and a few extra cards with special abilities. The four sets differed by the distribution of the pieces, the special abilities (unknown to me), and the themes: each set had a theme, and the cards had pictures from the themes. Two of the themes were African wildlife, and spacecraft.
I do not have the rules of the game. Some additional information and artwork can be found on the Boardgamegeek (search there for Express Chess) website.
If you have more information, or pictures that we can use here, please contact!
Written by Hans Bodlaender.
WWW page created: Januari 3, 2012.