Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype
Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Overview
Number of Players: 2-4
Components: Cloth game board, 32 dice in 4 colors. Each die should have one of each of the 6 symbols on it.
Object of the Game: Like any game, to have fun and enjoy the company of others! The game ends when a player has moved all of their pieces to the Home Row opposite their starting position.
Set Up
Each player takes the 8 dice of the color they choose, and sets them in any order in their starting row. Each player should have 2 Swords, 2 Trees, 2 Books, and 2 Flames to start, but can place them in any arrangement in their Home Row.
Choose a player to go first by any method you choose. The player to the left of the first player goes second, and so on.
How to Play
On their turn, each player may do one of two things.
- They may roll any one of their pieces and place it back where it was.
- They may move any of the pieces according to the rules for the face-up side.
Movement of the Pieces
I myself cut out and coloured pieces of cardboard of mysterious and significant shapes, the instruments of Table Gype; a game for the little ones. –Autobiography
Each die has six faces — Flame, Book, Sword, Tree, Hat, and Ear — and each face moves differently. A piece's identity is whichever face is showing.
Flame — The Flame is the most versatile piece, moving 1 space in any direction.
Fire, the most magic and startling of all material things, is a thing known only to man … It is the most human thing in the world. –Miscellany of Men
Book — The Book moves 1 space horizontally or vertically.
Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. –Heretics
Sword — The Swords move 1 space diagonally.
… for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance. –Orthodoxy
Tree — The Tree moves 1 space forward (towards its goal Home Row) vertically and diagonally, and backwards (towards its starting Home Row) vertically.
As long as a tree is a tree, it is a top-heavy monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one leg. But so long as a tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all. –Heretics
Ear — The Ear cannot move at all.
It was even duly settled what disease threatened the over-assiduous player; he tended to suffer from Gype's Ear. –Autobiography
Hat — The Hat moves two spaces vertically and one space horizontally, or 2 spaces horizontally and 1 space vertically, moving over all other pieces – exactly like a Knight in chess.
All pieces the Hat passes over must be rolled. The Hat is the only moving piece that cannot move multiple times by jumping.
Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder. – "On Running After One's Hat" from All Things Considered.
If it is difficult to remember all of the pieces to be rolled and where they go, you may want to use small tokens or coins as markers.
Worked Examples
In the example pictured, the Book may jump over the Tree and the Ear, landing above the Ear. Both the Ear and the Tree would be rolled.
One of the Hat's possible moves is to move two spaces to the right and one space up, landing directly below the Swords, causing the Tree to be rolled. It may NOT move again, even though it could pass over more pieces.
The Swords have no available jumps, for even though the Ear is adjacent, they can only jump as they move – diagonally. The Tree, however, can jump over the Flame or over the Book (if the space on the other side of the book is open), but not over the Hat.
The Flame has several multi-jump options. In one case, it can jump over the Hat, then the Tree, then the Swords, and then over the Ear back to its starting position, causing the other 4 pieces to be rolled.
Jumping
As in the game of Chinese Checkers, a piece may jump over an adjacent piece if there is an open space on the other side of the piece being jumped in the direction of the jumping piece's movement. All moving pieces (except for the Hat) may continue to jump as long as there is another valid jump available from the landing space.
Whenever a piece is jumped over, regardless of what player owns the piece, it is rolled, and must behave according to the new symbol. Pieces are never captured or removed from play.
In the case of a long series of jumps, the pieces that are jumped over are rolled one at a time and put back in place. Each player rolls their own pieces; it is not polite to touch another player's piece in the course of the game. No matter how many times a piece is jumped in a single series of jumps, it is only rolled once.
Boundaries
A piece may move freely into and out of its starting Home Row. It may not enter a Home Row other than the one directly across from its starting position.
Once a piece ends its turn in its destination Home Row, it may not be moved again. It may, however, continue a series of jumps within the Home Row before coming to rest.
Ending the Game
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land. –Tremendous Trifles
The game ends when a player gets all of their pieces into their destination Home Row. If the game would end in a draw because a player indefinitely blocks a final piece from entering their Home Row, the owner of the piece being blocked is declared the winner.
Variations
All sorts of variations and complications were invented in connection with Gype. –Autobiography
- To remove all chance from the game, do not roll the pieces when they are jumped.
- For a more random game, roll all the starting pieces – each player starts with whatever they rolled (we suggest re-rolling Ears until they come up as moving pieces, though).
- Or, allow players to choose their own starting pieces.
- To encourage more chaos, you may wish to require that a player may not cross the middle of the board with any of their pieces until their starting Home Row has been emptied.
Use your imagination! This is Gype, after all, and the possibilities are endless. Please share your experiences and variants on BoardGameGeek.com.
General Strategy & Tips
Games are competitive, because that is the only way of making them exciting. –What's Wrong With the World
As in life, players of Table Gype can only plan ahead so far; events beyond the control of all players can upset long-range plans. Unlike chess, where one may see a dozen moves ahead, Gype players must consider: what is the best move I can make, considering the state of things right now?
Pieces move twice as fast if they jump another piece; but jumping over your own pieces too much can inevitably cause Gype's Ear to show up, or disrupt future moves.
Having many pieces in play early in the game, instead of leaving several sitting in your home row, creates greater opportunity for more and longer jumps.
By correctly identifying pieces that are unlikely to be jumped by other players, knowing the probabilities that a piece can change into an unusable piece in a given situation, and making other observations, it is possible to make likely or even definite plans of action despite the chaos on the board.
About the Game
In his Autobiography, G.K. Chesterton tells of "the well-known and widespread national game of Gype" he created with his friend, H.G. Wells. While the rules of the sport were decided for several fields of play, including water, land, and on the table, the game was never officially invented – even though playing too much was known to lead to a condition known as "Gype's Ear." Wells himself documented several other games in his books Floor Games and Little Wars, but neither he nor Chesterton expounded on the rules of any version Gype.
Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype embodies several of the ideals Chesterton expressed elsewhere, such as the adventure of inconvenience (in All Things Considered) and how going around the world (or across a board) is the shortest way home (from Homesick at Home and Manalive). The quotations on the game board and scattered throughout these instructions are all from Chesterton's works. The "mysterious and significant shapes" on the playing pieces are all elements often found in Chesterton's writings.
For more information on G.K. Chesterton or the fictional character Uncle Chestnut, visit UncleChestnut.com or EternalRevolution.com
Contact us directly at [email protected], or discuss, review, and/or post questions about the game on BoardGameGeek.com.
What keeps adults from joining in children's games is, generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure in them; it is simply that they have no leisure for them. It is that they cannot afford the expenditure of toil and time and consideration for so grand and grave a scheme. –Tremendous Trifles
Component Care
Washing Instructions: The board and the bag can be machine washed in cold water. Hang dry to extend the life of your game, and do not iron. To remove wrinkles, toss in a dryer on a no-heat setting along with a slightly damp washcloth.