Coin Chess

I had one of those idea's today, you know the kind, one of those idea's that just seems to come at you from absolutely nowhere, the kind of idea that has no relation whatsoever to what is going on in your life, that kind of idea.

I haven't played chess in years so I really don't know where this come from, maybe it's because I think to much lol, anyway the idea come to me that you could quite easily have a game of chess by using nothing more than normal money as piece's.

Then I started to think about what rank might the diffrent coins take, I eventually worked it out into the following order

1p = Pawn
2p = Rook
50p = Knight
20p = Bishop
£1 = King
£2 = Queen
After that I had one big obstacle getting in the way of the whole idea, the main problem being that coins on opposite sides of the table would get mixed up when playing, as all coins on both sides of the table would be similar, this almost made me forget the whole thing.

Then I thought a little more about it, what if one player was to place the coins facing heads up, and the opposite player was to place the coins facing tails down, this would in effect change the pieces and create the difference for both players, as long as both players agreed not to cheat and turn the coins the other way up the game could indeed function.

I then had the problem of the colour issue as heads and tales is not a colour am I was unsure which side to make black and which side to make white?, I thought for almost 20 minutes more on this then one of my relative phoned, I discussed my dilemma with him and he was comical about it, he said in his simple way "that's an easy one make the head coins black, because people will remember that", I wondered what he meant so I inquired and he replied "black heads it's an easy word to remember and we have all had spots at some point, lol", so that's how I got round the colour problem.

I have knocked up a quick Picture to aid in understanding the idea below, please click on the image to enlarge it for better viewing.

I have used British currency for an example but you could apply this idea to any currency without encountering many problems as long as the country has 6 different types of coinage your good to go.

You could even spice up the game with a little wager. When playing a game of chess you take the other opponents pieces after a move, but as the pieces in this case are real money you could agree with the person your playing that the winner gets to keep the pieces(money), when they have checkmated the other player and won the game, the winner would also get all their pieces back that the loser may have taken throughout the game. I do however suggest only keeping a tally on how much you could have won instead of actually getting real money, because if the person you are playing is a grand master he or she could easily wipe you out.