: SuperDimension Games™ : Products : Tessaron™ : Instruction Guide : Appendix A Background

Origins

The motivation for Tessaron™ was to create a game that provides the strategic depth of chess while using the simple pieces of checkers. This is not as easy as it might seem! We spent years exploring various strategy games, teasing out their essential nature and identifying the most vital features.

Features

We determined that, in order to have sufficient depth of strategy, a game must embody the following three characteristics:

• a large number of potential game states,
• a wide variety of available moves,
• most of the board available most of the time.

With these characteristics in mind, the next step was to design an entirely new game that captured these essential features, but did so using very simple pieces.

The result

We built many prototypes, only to revise them again and again. But finally, after an exhaustive amount of effort, a game was created that expressed the essential features perfectly! This is the game you now see before you. This is the game we call Tessaron™.

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