Jungle Chess played with the solar system. Eight worlds a side, ranked one to eight — and on this board the rank is the size of the ball in your hand.
the planets at their true relative diameters
the same eight, as printed pieces — both rows drawn to the same total width
Matter at the near end, antimatter at the far one, on a field of 7 files and 9 ranks. The bases say which army a world belongs to: white for matter, black for antimatter, with the rank cut into the rim at both ends so either player can read it.
An asteroid belt of 12 cells crosses the middle, in ranks four to six, leaving the centre file open. Mercury is the only world that may enter it, and the only world beneath Jupiter that can take one — while Jupiter can never take Mercury at all.
A star stands at each end, 2 flames rising off its plate and 3 corona wells sunk into the deck around it, each well throwing up 2 spikes of its own. Step into an enemy corona and your rank counts for nothing while you stand there: anything can take you.
Lift the eight worlds off the board and line them up, and the pecking order is just their sizes. Mercury is the smallest world in play, Jupiter the largest, and every step in between is the fifth root of a real planetary diameter.
Every world leans by its planet’s own axial tilt, and the two armies lean opposite ways. Saturn gives it away at a glance: the rings on the white base and the rings on the black base point in different directions.
You win by walking one of your worlds onto the rival star. Mercury takes the short way: into the belt no other piece can cross, out onto the open centre file, and up it to the antimatter star.
Take each planet’s real diameter, raise it to the power of one fifth, multiply by a constant. That is the entire rule, and it is doing real work: the sky’s 29.3-to-one spread between Jupiter and Mercury becomes 1.96-to-one in the hand.
Scale the pieces linearly and Mercury is a bead beside a Jupiter that will not fit a cell. Ignore size and you are back to memorising a table of animals. The fifth root is the compression that keeps the order exact and still leaves eight pieces you can tell apart at arm’s length — and it puts Uranus and Neptune within a hair of each other, which is what they are.
The lean is real too. Uranus lies over at 98°, Jupiter stands within 3° of upright, and each antimatter world tilts the opposite way to its twin.
| World | Rank | In the sky | On the board |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury | 1 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Mars | 2 | 1.39 | 1.07 |
| Venus | 3 | 2.48 | 1.20 |
| Earth | 4 | 2.61 | 1.21 |
| Neptune | 5 | 10.2 | 1.59 |
| Uranus | 6 | 10.5 | 1.60 |
| Saturn | 7 | 24.7 | 1.89 |
| Jupiter | 8 | 29.3 | 1.96 |
180 printed parts in 13 filament colours, and 150 of them are the worlds. Each globe carries its surface as inlays rather than paint, so Earth is 15 parts on its own: the blue globe, 5 landmasses, 5 drylands, an ice cap, the base, and the rank cut into the rim at both ends. Venus, which has little to show, is 5.
The rest is the field. 4 board quadrants, 12 belt tiles, 6 corona wells, 2 stars carrying 4 flames, and 2 trays with 8 wells each — one well for every world an army can lose. The largest thing in the box is a board quadrant at 152 × 188 mm, which is why the board is quartered at all: nothing in the set asks for more than a 220 mm bed.
Key the four quadrants together, drop the belt and the corona wells into their pockets, and set the two stars facing each other down the open file.