Rebuilding Lost Rules
Instructions for playing some antique board games have been lost, erased by deterioration or neglect. The game of Chevy Chase is only about 130 years old, yet the surviving instructions are so broken that the game can’t be played.
After chasing the board through archives, publisher names, and a few side trails, I ended up doing what any stubborn game hunter would do: I made a playable version and worked backward from the clues.
A forgotten game in an Oxford archive
I hung onto this mystery because the board looked too interesting to ignore. Richard Ballam had donated a collection of roughly 1,500 games to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Chevy Chase was one of them. I reached out to him through the GARD archive and he shared a little more background, which helped, even if it didn't solve the whole puzzle.
What survived wasn't much. I had a couple of photos and a fragment of rules, and even the photos raised questions. They might show two different boards, or they might be the same board photographed under different light with different cameras. I still can't tell.
The board itself suggests motion and pursuit. There is a clear start area, an apparent destination, a red line that looks important, and unusual double diagonals that seem too deliberate to be decorative. Even before I understood anything else, I had the feeling I was looking at a chase game in the plainest sense of the word.
Why the name "Chevy Chase" is so slippery
The title leads in more than one direction. One theory ties "Chevy Chase" to the French word chevauchee, a term used for mounted raids in the medieval border country between Scotland and England. The other theory links it to the Cheviot Hills and the "chases," or hunting grounds, in that same region.
That second explanation fits nicely with the old English ballad "The Ballad of Chevy Chase," which connects the name to the Battle of Otterburn in 1388 and disputes over hunting rights. So the title might point to warfare, hunting, or both.
The publisher trail, and where it breaks apart
The surviving instruction sheet includes the name T.C. Ayres of Clerkenwell. That caught my eye because the Ayres name had come up before in my look at the board game Trafalgar. In that case, the publisher was F.H. Ayres, and for a time that business operated on Aldersgate Street, which runs toward Clerkenwell in London. There may be a connection, but I couldn't document it.
The next clue came from the AGPI catalog, which lists a Chevy Chase published by F.H. Ayres in 1858. That could be this game, a variant of it, or something else entirely. The dates and names are close enough to support that idea, but not close enough to close the case.
What the surviving rules actually say
The rule fragment starts clearly enough. Two players each get six pieces, two large "captains" and four smaller "men," placed in fortress cups according to color. After that, the text breaks down fast.
"The first player to advance one of his captains to any point beyond the red line..."
"Prisoners must be made at the request of the opponent..."
That first sentence never finishes its thought. The second sounds like nonsense. Richard Ballam noted that the archived rules are definitely incomplete, which explains a lot. He also suggested the design may borrow from a German siege game. Meanwhile, the board's shape made me think of a running-fight game, in the broad sense used for titles like Tablan or Sahkku where pieces push chase around a course while capturing the enemy.
I made up my own rules!
After a while I stopped trying to recover a complete original and started building a playable reconstruction from the board itself. My version uses the same components and set-up as the original: four soldiers per player aligned near the bottom of the board and two officers per player placed behind the soldiers. The goal: reach the group of five spaces at the opposite corner of the board.
Movement and scoring
I treated each starting area as one large connected space. The fortress at the far end works the same way, so once a piece enters it, it can be placed in any enclosed spot there.
Soldiers move one space along the printed lines. Officers move one space in any direction. The double diagonal lines looked special, so I made them “express lanes.” A move along one of those lines is two spaces instead of one.
The goal is simple: get as many of my pieces as possible into the opposite fortress. Officers are worth 3 points each, and soldiers are worth 1 point each. The game ends when one player fills their fortress, or one player can no longer make a legal move.
Captures, prisoners, and the red line
I used capture by displacement. If I land on an opposing piece, I capture it. However, I added one safeguard because the surviving rules fragment seems to care about protection and imprisonment. A piece cannot be captured if one of its companions is positioned so that the capturing piece would be taken immediately on the next move. In that case, the target is “covered.”
Only officers can capture officers. Captured pieces go into the captor's starting area and stay there as prisoners as long as that player keeps at least one soldier there on guard. I can move a piece back into my own start area for guard duty, but that guard should eventually head for the fortress or be taken trying.
The red line became my immunity rule. Any piece beyond it cannot be captured. If I move that same piece back below the line, the immunity is no longer in effect. (I also tested a couple of other ideas but I never found time to develop those further.)
Other Chevy Chase games did exist
This wasn't the only game to use the name. I found a few later sightings, even though several remain almost as shadowy as the one I started with.
- 1890, Hamilton Meyers Company, Middletown, PA — A medieval-looking Chevy Chase, possibly echoing the Otterburn ballad.
- 1909, McLoughlin Brothers, New York — Listed by AGPI, but I couldn't find any images or rules
• 1930, John Jaques & Sons Ltd., London — Another documented title with no solid details turning up.
• ca 1950, Robert Ross and Company, Southampton — Subtitled "the deerstalking game," clearly a hunting theme.
Without further reference, the Hamilton Meyers theme isn’t clear. The Robert Ross version makes the most thematic sense to me, because "deerstalking" fits the hunting origin of the name.
I don’t mind an occasional “dead end”
This sort of research takes time. I have to search, read, compare, write, and correspond, and sometimes I still end up with a game that refuses to explain itself. The journey is as important as the destination, right?
Through this research, I discovered a book that belongs on the shelf for this kind of work. The Antique Games Compendium was written by the people behind Games Board, and it includes a chapter by Richard Ballam. For anyone who likes antique games, obscure publishers, and the odd ways rules survive, it is a rich reference.