Sovereign Chess Sovereign Chess Sovereign Chess is a commercial chess variant designed by Mark Bates and produced by Infinite Pi Games. The game is played on a 16 x 16 board and begins with 112 pieces—a normal complement of white and black pieces (16 each), and 80 other colored pieces (8 each of 10 different colors). The colored pieces are considered “neutral” at the beginning of the game, and can not initially be moved nor captured. The center of the board contains an arrangement of 24 colored squares (2 each in every color, including white and black), which determine control of the
How Many Miles to Babylon? In the 1824 edition of "The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia" there's a description of the rhyme and the game, giving the distance as "six, seven or a lang eight". The rhyme was originally accompanied by a singing game in which two lines face each other, with one player in the middle. At the end of the rhyme the players have to cross the space and any caught help the original player in the middle catch the others. The game seems to have fallen out of use in the twentieth century. In literature In film In music How Many Miles to Babylon?