Yamie Chess

The Adventures of Tigermore & The Mind Angels

Yamie Chess Ltd

Reviewer: Jeremy Silman
Comic Book
2013
260 pages
paper


Unlike most board games, chess is often viewed as a mixture of game, sport, and science. Other than the joy of competition, which chess offers in abundance, it teaches chess fans (young and old) correct study habits, calculation skills, and increases their powers of logical reasoning. And, since a successful chess player needs to be creative, fans of the game find their minds zipping to fantastical vistas of intellect and imagination.

It’s not surprising then, that someone has finally blended all these things together to form something fun, something out of this world, and something deeply instructive. This new product is called Yamie Chess.

The first offering from Yamie Chess Ltd (www.yamiechess.com) is a 260-page comic book titled Yamie Chess: The Adventures of Tigermore & The Mind Angels. A “K-8 educational math learning aid series,” The Adventures of Tigermore & The Mind Angels is black and white, thus allowing young readers to use it as a coloring book.

What makes this unique is that the book offers several things at the same time: The storyline gives us a beautifully drawn, deeply conceived, emotionally compelling fantasy adventure. To progress, you will discover that you’re effortlessly learning how the chess pieces move (the adventure begins in earnest after you learn chess basics), and your newfound knowledge of chess will seamlessly blend into math lessons, physics, and moral imperatives.

I could go on and on about Kimi (the chess genius who has to save the mind-planet), Tigermore, Little Bu, the evil King Vigdor, or any number of other fascinating characters, but the thing I enjoyed the most was the map on pages 10 and 11. This map is important, and gives you a feel for the world that the reader will be inhabiting as he/she moves through the comic. I really appreciated the various names on the map for oceans, mountains, rivers, bays, locations, etc. In a world where more and more people are oblivious to those that came before us, the map beautifully mixes the names of chess legends, philosophers, and mathematicians. In a way, the young boys and girls that embrace Yamie Chess won’t only learn about chess, math, science, and morals, but also history!

Here are some examples: Turing’s Computer Sea (Alan Turing – a British mathematician, born 1912. He was also a brilliant cryptanalysis, logician, and computer scientist), Poincare Ridge (Henri Poincare – a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a science philosopher), the Fischer Sea (Bobby Fischer – the waves of the sea mix well with the emotional waves Fischer created all over the world), Euclid’s Space (a mathematician from ancient Greece – 300 BC), Tal Trench (This has nothing to do with one’s height and everything to do with the great Latvian chess genius Mikhail Tal), Euwe Cape (the only Dutch World Chess Champion, Max Euwe is a legend in his country), Descartes’ Mathematical Ocean (Rene Decartes, a French mathematician and philosopher, he’s known as the father of analytical geometry), and much, much more!

I highly recommend Yamie Chess: The Adventures of Tigermore & The Mind Angels. When a child learns how to play chess, adds a lot to his/her science education, and has a wonderful time walking through a rich fantasy world, you can’t go wrong!