New Chess Piece Officially Adopted!
Posted: Sun Oct 15, 2006 5:31 am
From http://newsbiscuit.com/article/new-chess-piece-introduced:
The World Chess Federation today unveiled the new chess piece that they hope will revive flagging interest in the ancient board game. Fears that teenagers were more interested in Playstation games such as ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and ‘Gangs of London’ had persuaded the WCF to update the once popular game.
After much controversy and anticipation, the new piece will be known as ‘The Monk’. There were gasps as the piece was unveiled before the world’s media by Former Grand Master Uri Yelanov and Carol Vorderman.
‘It is very exciting’ said Yelanov, ‘the monk can move three spaces horizontally or diagonally and occupies the starting positions of the middle two pawns that the monks now replace. Suddenly chess is exciting as Playstation!’
However traditionalists were highly critical of changing any of the pieces at all, as well as the plan to put sponsors’ names on the chest of the king and queen. Others have criticised the monk as being too conservative. Ideas that were rejected by the World Chess Federation included ‘the Archer’ which allowed you to cheat,’ the Tardis’, which could go back in time and undo stupid moves you did ten minutes ago and ‘the B52’ which allowed you to blow up all your opponents pieces before the game had even started.