Jim was one of the first men I met when we came to live here in Asia 7 years ago. We had not found the right place to build our house yet, so we stayed in a guest house. On one of the first days, the owner introduced us to Jim, an English man, a little older than me, who had been living for over twenty years in what would become our hometown. We turned out to have the same interests, like in music and art, and both were not that interested in small talk. Out of the blue, Jim asked if I could play chess. I said I could, but hadn't played in over 15 years.
"How about next Tuesday morning?" he asked.
"Why not... I'll be there," I replied.
That was the start of 6 years of weekly chess mornings on Tuesdays. And it was more than just chess. We discussed anything and everything. Sometimes an hour had already passed and we had only made our opening moves. Another time we were mostly silent and played 5 or 6 games.
Jim clearly played better than me. I was never completely out of luck, but he won 3 out of 4 games. And I suspected that he sometimes let me win that one game on purpose. After about 6 years of playing, he hinted that he was getting a bit bored. We switched to Cappablanca Chess for a while, a variant with 2 extra pieces. But Jim seemed to have had enough anyway.
One day we had left the chess pieces in the box and were chatting and joking and philosophizing how we could make chess more exciting.
"I have an idea," I said with a mischievous grin, "but we can't execute it here."
"You make me curious, tell me," Jim replied.
"No," I laughed, "I should have kept my mouth shut. It's really a silly joke."
"Then I want to know for sure now", was Jim's reply.
"Okay, okay, I was thinking about a variant of strip poker, where you can buy back lost pieces by taking off a piece of clothing. Strip chess so to speak."
Jim nearly fell off his chair laughing. "Have you thought about the rules yet?"
"Unlike strip poker, it shouldn't be about getting the other person's clothes off as quickly as possible. It should remain chess, so the goal is still to capture the other person's king. But that has been captured can be bought back again. A shoe or sock for a pawn, a shirt for a knight or bishop, trousers for a rook and underpants for the queen."
Jim thought about it for a moment and then asked, "What if you want to buy back your queen, but you still have your pants on?"
"I have also thought about that. In that situation you will have to take off your pants too. If you already lost a rook, you will get it back. Otherwise you are out of luck and it will be a very expensive queen."