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Dragon Chess (tm). Commercial board game played on a large board with a new piece -- the Dragon.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I had one of those tan-vs.-brown Renaissance sets as a teen in the sixties, too, and I have no idea what happened to it. FWIW, we might salute these folks for stumping up for the tooling to cast the extra (dragon) piece; they might have contracted for a run of standard Ren. pieces, if they're the same as the old ones, but the Dragon must be new. Plastic injection molds are complex precision machines and very expensive, and to make one for a chess-set indicates a serious commitment. The ubiquitous plastic picnic fork and knife are made in exactly the same kind of mold, but sold cheap by the millions, are not nearly as risky an investment; you've gotta sell a LOT of either to justify the tooling costs, and chess sets are a much lower demand item.
thanks for your answers Fergus and Gary, it seems this dragon piece is pretty rare, i like it, stronger than bishop but not stronger than rook, though i feel it must be very close to being as strong as a rook, in crowded and close quarters it is powerful. it also seems the board is very unusual, yes? i like the way it 'cuts the corners' of the board, i think it makes for greater game play, and the adding of squares in the mid-central area, i think that is pretty interesting too.
This is unbelievable! This is completely uncreative! The guy or guys who invented this not only don't care about chess, they surely don't know the least about chess (if you don't believe me, read what they've put on their website)! The bigger board is a blant copy of dozens of other variants: because there are two added pieces, we need two more files and since we want a squared board, we need also two more ranks! Boring and done thousands of times before!!! Another novelty: we need a pawn in front of the new pieces!!! Wow, that's new!!! And the two 3x4 squares at the sides: what the hell are they good for? There is no justification for them! They are just there because! There is not a real need for them to be there!!! The pawn can't go there and the board is already 100 squares big! Who needs the extra 24 squares that don't have a real purpose!!! It's obvious that they wanted to create a patented chess set that they could commercialize! And they wanted to add a dragon! The pieces look really cool and so do the graphics also. But beside that, there is nothing. They just took chess and added a piece that moves like a weak queen. A piece they really wanted to have the form of a dragon so they could use cool graphics and could commercialize! Really sad. I know much better and creative variants.
Well, let us start calling poor 'poor'. Even though taking exception to 'Kasparov-Fisher's, or 'Fisher-Kasparov's, indelicacy at times, as a game to play Dragon Chess(tm) adds nothing to the art, zilch. That is because restricted Queen is bad Chess piece. That goes for all CVs too that use one- or two-step, or one- or two- or three-step, movers in radial lines. The reason they are all poor pieces, whether Rook-like, Bishop-like, or Queen-like, is that there is no rationale not to go to one-, two- three- and four-stepping. As a pretext for making 10x10 board, however, this Dragon Chess(tm) makes sense for them and their own interest.
Just got in the mail today a set of Dragon Chess I purchased on ebay. Not too impressed with the 3-squares movement of the Dragon... But a nice looking set to have for playing variants (I'll most likely redefine the movement of the Dragon). My 9 year old son loved the look of the set, specially the Dragons. I saw these Renaissance pieces years ago (never owned this type of set) when I was in university. What I paid for the Dragon Chess set was money well spent, and it is in brand new condition.
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