#space chess

SPACE CHESS FLORENCE FOR @honky-val 🥹🥹🫶🫶🫶

I found a copy at a thrift store in high school. It was missing a bunch of pieces, but it had tons of vintage memorabilia in it because the guy who donated must have been a huge fan; it's got newsletters, newspaper clippings, a mail-in catalog for Terrace merch (well, a mail-in leaflet), the whole shebang.

It's not a great game (I've played it exactly once against my little sister, but neither of us understood the rules so it was the blind leading the blind), and it's main claim to fame is being featured in the background of a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation because the producers liked how futuristic it looked, but I just love how earnest and optimistic the creator was. He had plans for the future, big plans, he thought Terrace was gonna be the next big thing; every household in America would have a Terrace board, there would be international Terrace tournaments with grandmasters and named opening moves and countless books on Terrace strategy, mathematicians would try to "solve" Terrace with supercomputers, he really thought it was gonna be the Game of the Millenium.

I can't find any evidence of the Terrace Times newsletter online, so I may well be the last person on Earth who still has a copy of any of them. Issue 001 is lost to the aether, and I don't know if there ever were any issues 005 or above. The Wayback Machine archived a few old Terrace webpages, but most of them are 404 inaccessible and the rest are just single paragraphs of blue text on a light blue background telling me stuff I already know, classic dotcom bubble site.

I wonder how many kids got a Terrace set for Christmas '93

I wonder if Terrace ever got ported to PC, and how many floppies it moved

I wonder if that Michael Winslow commercial ever aired anywhere

They used to do drinking games before Omega came along.

9 times out of 10, Crosshair would win because he was the only one capable of holding more than six shots without being totally wasted.

Hunter is not allowed to play poker.

Hunter is not allowed to play Sabacc

Hunter is not allowed to play gin.

Wrecker is, of course, a child. He and Omega play a lot of Go Fish.

Echo likes Monopoly. Tech does not. He always has to clean up after Crosshair.

Wrecker will flip the board if he plays Scrabble with Tech. It is inevitable.

Crosshair will take out a deck of cards and play Solitaire with himself like a cranky old man.

Hunter is the best shuffler. He knows how to do all sorts of fancy tricks.

Tech counts cards.

Sometimes, after Omega goes to bed, they will gamble.

Tech is hellbent on beating Omega at one game of Dejarik (space chess).

Crosshair cheats at dice.

Crosshair cheats at cards.

Crosshair can and will teach Omega how to cheat at everything.

Echo wins at Sabacc most of the time because he played it so much with the 501st.

When Oh Hell is introduced to the Marauder, chaos ensues. Everyone goes to bed angry except Hunter who has found himself a new game to get banned from.

Wrecker is surprisingly good at Yahtzee.

When Omega found out how much Crosshair cheats, she and Wrecker made a shame hat that he has to wear every time he gets caught.