FIDCHELL
high resolution file available here

This board game was one of my long-standing obsessions and I drew this as a kind of logo for it. In the mid to late 1970s I first came across mention of a lost Celtic board game called Fidchell that appears in several ancient Irish epics and chronicles. Under the name of Gwyddbwyll it also appears in the Welsh Mabinogion and was apparently held in peculiar reverence throughout the British Isles. Intrigued, I set about trying to recreate it and even came up with a chess-like board game that fits the criteria and is really quite different from other games. Unlike chess all but one of the pieces have the same value; but their strength depends on their position on the board, much more so than in standard chess. Sadly, there isn't really enough evidence to claim that the game I came up with actually is the original Fidchell – someone would have to unearth an ancient game board bearing exactly this pattern for that to be so. But it was a lot of fun and while testing it out we even got a kind of tournament going for a while in our local pub.