The origin of the name and logo

Why is this game called Mystic Chess? Well it all started during the Open of Béthune, when I had the idea of creating a new game based on my two favorite board games: chess and Terra Mystica. We just acquired the latter and were having a lot of fun with it. I liked the fact that it is a "full information game", meaning there is no luck involved and all the information is visible to all players all the time, as in chess.

The logo of Terra Mystica

In this game, players develop their so-called factions by developing/upgrading buildings and changing the nature of the fields around them, a process called terraforming. This gives the name of the game Terra Mystica, with the ground changing shapes like the X-men character Mystique. The word Mystic comes from the Greek μυστικός (mustikos), which can either mean initiate or secret, the latter being also linked to the word mysterious.

I had two main possibilities to merge the two games:

- introducing the terraforming process in chess: changing black squares into light squares (and the other way around) could be interesting in terms of territory development, but it was difficult to link it to the chess pieces.

- using the upgrade idea seen in the buildings: a dwelling can be upgraded to a trade post, which can further be upgraded either to a fortress or a temple. This proves easier to implement and I went further down that path.

Now how to upgrade pieces? I wanted to keep as close as possible to chess, keeping the movement of the original chess pieces on an orthodox board. No new chess pieces with superpowers, like in many chess variants. A game that people having a normal chess set could easily implement. The concept of coins has quickly been introduced, as buildings in Terra Mystica are also built and upgraded using coins (as well as workers). Then the idea of starting from an almost empty board and drop pawns on the squares you want came from the chess variant Raindropchess, which we also enjoy a lot at home. Instead of coins, that game uses cards to decide which pieces are dropped on the board. So there we were with almost all the rules. Some quick fine-tuning on the optimal number of coins to start with and on the allowed squares to drop a pawn, and Mystic Chess was born!

Why mysticchessgame in the blog and email address? Well it is simple, the mysticchess account had already been used by a chess school.

The Mystic Chess logo has been rather simple to make: the idea of changing the nature of the chess pieces led to the implementation of mysterious chess piece, whose identity is hidden by a mask. In this case the "mask" is a tagelmust, a turban worn by the Tuareg men to protect them from the sand of the Sahara. And the background color is the same as the logo of Terra Mystica.