Episode Details

Chess is the King of Games. It just is. It’s not Buckaroo. It’s not Kerplunk. You don’t see political strategists huddled in a bunker in the Pentagon trying to model geopolitical implications by extracting a plastic stick from a tube so that the marbles don’t fall. No. They play chess.

​Chess is the King of Games because it is a map.

​If we look at the brief history of chess we see a game that evolved out of chaturanga in 6th century India. It spread to the Persians. Then the Arabs got a hold of it. Then it made its way to Europe, where the Europeans, in their infinite wisdom, decided what the game really needed was a phenomenally powerful, hyper-mobile Queen, presumably because medieval European men desperately needed a strong maternal figure to tell them where to go and who to kill.

​But through all of these iterations, from the dust of India to the pristine digital boards of chess.com, chess has remained fundamentally the same thing. It is a map. 

A map… of POWER.

​Just let that sit there for a minute. A map of power. If you’ve come here for a whimsical romp, you’re in the wrong place. We’re doing structural analysis of power dynamics using board games. We’re doing the coolest scifi novel ever written about gameplayers. And we’re doing a brutally honest look at Why Leftists Always Lose.

But first we need to talk about Contrapoints.

Buckle-up.

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