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Congo by Demian Freeling (around 1980?) Congo is a well-known chess variant which can be played on Christiaan Freeling’s beautiful MindSports Arena website. The redoubtable Richard’s PBeM server also supports Congo, and Zillions of Games now supports it.. I refer you to either site for the rules and history of the game (Demian Freeling is Christiaan Freeling’s son, so the presentation at MindSports is surely definitive); I include it here because I made a beautiful Congo set and want to show it off. |
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The pieces are Giraffe, Monkey, Elephant, Lion, Crocodile, and Zebra. I found the animal figures in children’s toy sets, but I had to buy many sets to get enough of all the figures I needed. The surplus animals I gave to a day-care center, so I didn’t look on it as wasted money. To give the figures a gamepiece look, and distinguish the two armies, I wanted to attach them to a disk-shaped base that could be colored white or black. For this I used the caps that came on bottles of cat litter. The bases for the black army I painted with model paint. |
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The hardest part was attaching the animal figures to the bases: no glue would hold them. I finally used a pushpin to poke holes through the plastic figures’ feet, and through the plastic cap near where those feet needed to be mounted. Then I tied down the animals with clear nylon monofilament fishing line, threading through the holes in the cap, and fixed the knots with epoxy on the underside. Finally I poured plaster of paris into the caps to give them weight, and cut circles of adhesive felt (from the hardware store) onto each piece’s underside. |
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The board itself had to be pretty large to accommodate the pieces. I used black foamboard and glued squares of colored paper onto it. I had to make it in two unequal pieces (the board being 7x7, and 7 being odd). Too bad I’m not a woodworker! I chose to use different coloration from the MindSports Arena standard, with blue to suggest water, green to suggest jungle, and orange to suggest the Lion’s domain (savannah?). |
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