THE GAMEMASTER

Readers who play Dungeons and Dragons or the card game Magic may be surprised to discover that the drama behind chess is similar to the games they enjoy. A magical wind blows a young boy onto a chessboard, where the kings and queens send him on a mission to find the Gamemaster, with the help of an amulet belonging to one of the queens. The young hero meets all the other chess pieces in their human forms—pawns, rooks, knights, bishops. When no Gamemaster appears at the end of his travails, the boy turns to the amulet; it is a mirror and he is the Gamemaster. The ending of John Bochak's first book is clichÇd and the underlying message—that chess schools players in self-knowledge—is fairly subtle for the picture book crowd. They will be busy with the animated cut-paper collage illustrations: a mix of marbled and colored papers that recall a romanticized Middle Ages, where pawns are miraculously clean-shaven and class distinctions vanquished. This interesting fantasy neither recreates the history of chess nor provides a satifying alternative to role-playing games. (Picture book. 6-9)