Roller Coaster Chess
A while ago I drew a comic about playing chess on a roller coaster. Various xkcd readers took up the challenge.
Pictured above: Andrew Burke, Chris Ranker, Ryan DowlingSoka, and Chance Brown.
To see more pictures of chess on rides, go to xkcd.com/chesscoaster. If you think you can do better, go for it, and send the pictures to rmunroe@gmail.com. But remember, I am not advocating doing anything dangerous unless it’s really cool.
July 18th, 2007 at 4:13 am
A perfect picture… yet it’s missing something like “white moves and mates in 2 moves”.. :)
July 18th, 2007 at 4:24 am
Coolest picture I’ve seen all day.
Reminds me of this: http://img.smoothweb.net/laugh_lose/rollercoaster.jpg
July 18th, 2007 at 4:50 am
Your fandom is made of win.
July 18th, 2007 at 6:30 am
Somewhere in my closet from a trip a couple years back is a picture of me painting my nails on the tower of terror and another of me meditating on the same ride. It’s my belief that everyone should have one awesome picture on some kind of coaster or they just aren’t living to the max.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:09 am
Impressive photos inspired by a genius comic. Makes me want to get out the old scrabble set and head off to Alton Towers. Remember to Digg it.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:10 am
Reminds me of the Norwegian engineer kids video, for some reason.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I know them! ^_^
July 18th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Fantastic! I’m afraid it’s not a legal chess position, though. They cannot be playing a game of team chess (ie. black is closest to the camera), as the piece placement would indicate, as black would then have a dark field in the lower-right (you can see the “f8″ field being dark, so “h8″ must also be dark). So, black must be on the right and white on the left, or vice versa. But then there is a black pawn on either the 1st or the 8th rank, both of which are impossible.
/* Steinar */
July 18th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Clearly black has just moved a pawn to its 8th rank and is contemplating what to promote it to. Stalemates due to white being unable to move are historically frequent at Daredevil Falls, especially when the Three Sailors opening is used, so promotion to Queen might be injudicious.
July 18th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
They probably got the Loch Ness picture off during one of the million ride set-ups the crew gets per day. Would’ve been easier to take it onto Wolf; unless the article is as big as you (or dangerous, I guess), we don’t even care what you bring on the ride, but we’re damn well not going to shut the ride down because you dropped it.
July 18th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
It would make a good picture if a whole group of people put a little chess table in the middle of one of these.
Too bad the park officials would never allow it.
July 18th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
We did get it on one of those circle raft ride things. And also on a baby car ride. The pictures aren’t very good, though. That was so fun… Great times at Dollywood.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
There will be comic where very hyperbolically it is suggested that the fans of xkcd rise up and take over the world.
The morning following the posting of that strip you will receive an email along the lines of “Objective Achieved. What your bidding my master.”
July 18th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Yup yup. Aaron has the right of it. A very common stalemate at Daredevil falls strangely enough.
But yeah, Steinar. When I was gluing the pieces to the board I didn’t really care about getting anything more than a ‘realistic’ looking board. I went for balance over anything else, mostly because I didn’t know if we would be able to get it on at all.
@Qabach: Yeah we got a picture on it, the guys were really nice about it. Not sure those came out well as I never saw them. I’ll see if I can get the guy who took them to get them online. (If they aren’t already).
You have no idea how happy this has made me… Like crazy happy… Insanely even.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Yes, Ryan told me of his plan and I decided to join in. We got two more than expected so we played four-way chess. I cannot believe that I did not laugh on the way down, but I pulled off the serious look of contemplation.
I won the game.
July 19th, 2007 at 12:15 am
http://pics.livejournal.com/athelind/pic/00005bc1
July 19th, 2007 at 12:17 am
That’s fan-freaking-tastic! Life imitating XKCD yet again….
July 19th, 2007 at 1:02 am
@ Chance Brown
I lost the game. :(
July 19th, 2007 at 1:52 am
I didn’t lose th….
Fuck, I lose.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:01 am
Gahh.
>.
July 19th, 2007 at 7:42 am
I was just talking to a friend about this xkcd comic a couple of days ago — and am taking off with the family to Dollywood tomorrow for our annual summer vacation — so what a hoot to pull this up today and see this — BRILLIANT!!
July 19th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
That “on your coastr” pic is good - clever twist on the usual. Anyway, awesome speight of digging people, first time I’ve every picked a story that hit the front page - maybe we’ll see even more extreme gaming pictures as a result.
July 19th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
I’ve actually played Go on the floor of a metal disco. The floor had some mosaic-like stones…
We also had no pieces, so we ripped some flyers apart. It was fun, but we didn’t make pictures :-/
July 19th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
I take it the wind/air friction would be too high to play cards on a rollercoaster?
July 19th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I’ve been planning to do that at the next amusement park I go to. But amazing pictures! Yay for your fandom!
July 19th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
@Keith, Thats awesome! Nice job with it.
Oh and I lost the game.
http://www.losethegame.com/
July 19th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
This was just mentioned on G4’s Attack of the Show! Exciting!
July 19th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
I hate you people.
All because I lost the game. I was doing fine until you all brought it up.
July 19th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
now, if we can somhow get a yoga person, get him to like put his leg over his head, and have the second person spining the wheel. better picture maby?
July 19th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
I rode the Everest ride at Animal Kingdom in Disney World Florida, and on the ride, I held on to my glasses at one point, and at that very point, they snapped the picture.
There was a really awesome picture of me looking very thoughtful with my hand on my glasses as if I was putting them back on after cleaning them.
I should have bought that one…
July 20th, 2007 at 12:56 am
@Sean: I’m gonna take that one as a challenge.
July 20th, 2007 at 6:50 am
OH NO, RAPTORS! If only xkcd-comic-strip guy had been wearing his antiraptor tshirt he would have been saved!
PS Good luck to you megabigblur
July 20th, 2007 at 7:00 am
This XKCD was on Attack of The Show yesterday!
July 20th, 2007 at 8:16 am
[...] So expect a decent friendship update next week. Until then, everyone should look at this. This is the sort of thing that elevates us nerds above [...]
July 20th, 2007 at 8:56 am
this is the stuff of children’s lit of old…
“…and the moral of the story is: if you take shortcuts in your work, you’ll be gored by a velociraptor…”
and the children quiver in their beds.
XD
love it!
July 20th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
I can see this being turned into an informational poster and put on the wall of our first year programming labs.
July 20th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
That just made my day.
Specially the Helicopter one. Good Job Captain.
Next step: Parachuting with a chess board :D
July 20th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
I hate y’all because I lost.
And I wish I would have thought to do something similar when I was at Great America — it was physics day, they might not have checked too closely.
July 21st, 2007 at 1:38 am
From the pictures page:
“Jordan Stosky (right, looking at the board) and his friend Lucas travel from Canada to Florida to play chess on the Revenge of the Mummy coaster.”
From the picture it’s associated with:
“Universal Studios Hollywood”
Last I checked, Hollywood was California. “Universal Studios Florida” would be the one in Orlando, Florida. Besides, if they were in Florida, they would have taken the picture on “The Incredible Hulk”. Far geekier.
July 21st, 2007 at 3:41 pm
I love the picture you guys!
I wish they would’ve let you bring it onto more rides. That would’ve been pretty kickass but they suck so.. yeah.. they didn’t…
Anyway.. I’m gonna try and find that AOTS episode and then I guess I’ll see you guys later..
Next time we go to Dollywood, bring a game of Clue.
((”Mrs. Scarlet!!! How could you?!?!?!”))
XOXO you guys!! ♥
July 21st, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Crap. I can’t think of anything that would top this.
Unless I played a game of chess on the back of the actual loch ness monster…
/me gets his tiny net.
July 21st, 2007 at 8:19 pm
Perhaps, to accentuate the geek factor of the whole thing, participants could attempt fit a new processor, set up wifi on Linux, program something in INTERCAL or create a detailed anti-raptor pamphlet in TeX in the time it takes for the rollercoaster to do a circuit?
Not as many good photo-ops, but more of a challenge I feel :)
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:40 am
I loved this picture, and then y’all made me lose.
Now I hate y’all. But I still love the picture.
July 22nd, 2007 at 7:47 am
AGH
IF you don’t stop mentioning it,
everytime I re-check the site
i’m going to lose again!
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:10 pm
So are you planning on ever telling anyone you’re going to have a story in Ryan North’s Machine of Death anthology?
July 22nd, 2007 at 7:05 pm
I lost the game! STOP LOSING ON ME!
-wah.
Funny that, people kept saying that they lost and I didn’t know what they were talking about, despite having been playing the game for a good long time. I was that good at it. Then I took a moment to think again why everyone was losing and BAM!
July 23rd, 2007 at 5:02 am
hmmm, I wonder if this could be done with Monopoly? But what would i do with my money and properties? Glue them to cardboard then glue that to the Monopoly board maybe?
July 23rd, 2007 at 9:28 am
You are an inspiration, indeed..
You inspired me to draw/express my own thoughts/happenings..
http://balasubramanians.com/blog/?cat=1
Thank You!
-raj
July 23rd, 2007 at 2:24 pm
in the additional pictures you have, the one of this kid named nate, you said that the roller coaster camera didn’t catch it but they snuck on a digital camera. then you said, i’m amazed he held on to the board.
…i’m equally as amazed they held on to the camera. :)
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:38 pm
I can’t help but notice xkcd-guy’s getting a lot of violent retribution for his crimes against the Standard Procedures of technology (read the manual, program flow…)
July 24th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Have you seen that? You’re in a German Internet TV-show called “Ehrensenf” :) http://www.ehrensenf.de/2007/07/24/jackson-im-knast-endlos-klettern-schnee-auto-tee-kunst/?vid=Quicktime
July 24th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Years ago, my high school friends and i decided it make a good picture it we all looked bored on the roller coaster. the picture is hilarious with the people behind us freaking out and us looking half asleep. more recently, my girlfriend and i thought it would be cute if we were kissing when th picture was taken, the photos cam out well, i’ll have to se about getting them scanned.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Hey, I remember reading one of your comics before talking about Jim Davis throwing off his commercial shackles or something to that effect and wondered if you’d seen the October 1989 Garfield comics… http://garfieldisdead.ytmnd.com/ has them and the Wikipedia Garfield entry says more.
Also, I love these Rollercoaster Chess pictures and can’t wait for more. Hilarious.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Had your vacation yet?
How about Dinosaurland?
looks like fun :D
http://devilspanties.keenspot.com/dinosaurland07.html
July 25th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
…I lose, and I hate you all.
July 26th, 2007 at 2:36 am
I’m going to Universal Studios in a couple of weeks. I’m planning on doing this on Jurassic Park.
It will be epic.
July 27th, 2007 at 12:37 am
By the way, I dunno if you’ve noticed yet but the Irregular Webcomic guy did a parody of xkcd.
July 27th, 2007 at 8:00 am
That’s awesome on so many levels.
July 30th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Oh come on. By now you must know how badly some members of your fandom are going to get hurt trying to skateboard while clutching their PSPs now that you’ve posted this strip. It’s cruelty after a certain point.
July 30th, 2007 at 7:25 am
Incidentally, regarding ‘the game’ - there’s an obvious and much less boring variant which my friends call “The Pillaging Game”. If you think of it first, you win (and state “IJ W T Pillaging Game”). If you hear someone win, you’re pillaged and lose. (and state “IJ L TPG”).
Further, regarding this spam protection, it stumped me for a good half hour once, until I realised that “Sum of 3+7″ was not looking for the perfectly valid answer “3+7″.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:10 am
This is great. But now it’s made me want to see bughouse. Random complaint: how long has it been since you could watch TV without the lower-right 5% of the screen occupied by the station’s logo? I watch PBS almost exclusively to escape ad bombardment in my home, and even they do this.
August 1st, 2007 at 2:38 pm
In regards to the lisp comic (which is hilarious) isnt it “_from_ a more.. civilized age” ?
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:38 am
Fantastic stuff. I am announcing my intention: I am getting my open water scuba certification, and a large reason for this is to take a chess board down to 100 feet.
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:17 pm
MIT totally hasn’t deconstructed the computer science program. Sure, it doesn’t require you to learn Scheme anymore, but who’s missing Scheme?
(I took the class…great for theory, but I wanted to kill Scheme so much by the end of it. Object-Oriented for the win.)
August 3rd, 2007 at 4:19 pm
See, i knew that bit about science being nonsense… My religious studies teacher told me.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
here i am, an active math-hater but maniacal stick-figure-drawer, compulsively hooked on to your webcomic. i’ve been reaidng it for a while, only i was a little nervous about commenting.
it’s a great comic, this is a great blag, and thanks for making me laugh a lot.. even though i only get about two-thirds of it.
August 6th, 2007 at 10:19 am
After seeing the Tesla Coil comic, I couldn’t resist posting this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ff_AXVlo9U
Its a video of the “Singing” Tesla Coil at Duckon 2007. Not sure how, but they found a way to modulate the pitch in order to play simple midi songs on the coil.
August 6th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Awesome
I would pay money to know what went through the heads of the folks at the photobooth when they saw this come through.
August 6th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
oh, what i wouldn’t give to have friends who understand why this is so awesome. none of them believe me.
August 6th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Waste of glue…
August 7th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I wasn’t paying much attention, but then like the third time i looked across this blag, i noticed Chris Ranker’s name.. I just got done working with this guy for a couple months and found it quite odd that this picture (which is THE BEST of the coaster pics!) was on here and that he was in it. Rock on guys.
August 8th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Hey, I’m the one who was on the Loch Ness coaster. It occured to me that this video might be of interest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4FAh5sytt8
August 8th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Wow. Happy #300 :-)
August 10th, 2007 at 2:28 am
That picture is noice (Australian for “nice”).
August 29th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
eXtreme Knowledge Comically Distributed ?
http://xkcd.com/
Source: *shrug*
What is it: I’ll just cite the tagline: “A Webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”. Very often Randall Munroe simply hits right on the mark with a witty remark, a funny line, or the “a…
September 1st, 2007 at 9:30 pm
XDDD
CHINGÓN!!
F*ckin AWSOME! someone do it!
how can you get that board inside?? brilliant!
September 10th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
On a random note:
I never realized these blags existed until last night.
Or more specifically: Until four this morning.
It’s a whole new world behind xkcd.
As for the topic at hand:
If astroworld was still around, they’d never see me coming!
As it is, I’ll probably go to Fiesta Texas and do it.
Maybe with a glued together Jenga set?
September 13th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Apparently the creators of the Bunny comic have taken a liking to this particular idea. That makes me ridiculously happy.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
[...] includes in his webcomic come true. Sometimes it’s out of his control, and just due to readers gettin’ creative. Sometimes Munroe nudges it along. Truly, I’m hard-pressed to think of any better use of the [...]
October 30th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
greatings…
Agree…
November 1st, 2007 at 10:40 pm
[...] for more info on Wet Riffs, and of course the Stallman issue and The Meet Up but it’s the roller coaster chess ride that really did it for [...]
January 30th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
lol that’s funny
February 5th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Uncensored Paris Hilton sex tape…
Recently leaked footage of the new Paris Hilton sex tape…
May 1st, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Thats not real!!!!
May 20th, 2008 at 12:54 am
Great picture. Me and my daughter Jillian just got back from Dollywood on Sunday. There is a new ride called Mystery Mine. Take a look at the picture in my post and tell me if you can play chest on that thing!
June 5th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I’d like to see them play Operation.