Chapter — Ordell and the Straight Path

Ordell moves in a way that looks, to everyone raised on diagonal checkers, slightly wrong — and he loves the exact moment their faces do the thing.

He slides a piece straight forward. Then, next turn, straight sideways. Never once on the diagonal. New opponents watch this with visible discomfort, like listening to a familiar song played in a different key. “You keep waiting for me to go diagonal,” he says, delighted, “because someone told you that’s how checkers moves. But that’s not a law of the universe. That’s just the way your checkers moves. Where I learned — Turkish draughts — pieces go straight. Forward and sideways, along the lines, never the corners.” He captures a piece by jumping straight over it. “Same game. Same heart. One rule turned ninety degrees. And watch how everything else has to rearrange itself around that one change.”

Ordell grew up between two families who did everything a little differently — different foods, different holidays, different words for the same things — and for a while it made him anxious, because he kept wanting to know which way was right. Then it slowly dawned on him: both. Neither. The question was wrong. His grandmother’s way and his other grandmother’s way were both complete, both worked, both made total sense from the inside. He stopped asking “which is correct?” and started asking “what does each way make possible that the other doesn’t?” — and the world got much more interesting and much less scary.

“That’s what a real variant teaches you,” he says. “Not a house rule, not a tweak — a variant that changes something fundamental, like the direction pieces move. Because then you can’t just ‘play checkers on it.’ You have to rethink from the ground up. And rethinking from the ground up is the most useful thing a game can ask of you.”

He came to the CrownTales academy after Draughtsmith, the master, sought out someone who could teach that the most basic rule is a choice, not a given. On his first day the master challenged him: “Show us why Turkish draughts isn’t just ‘checkers, but sideways.’” Ordell set up a position. “On your board, a piece in the center controls four diagonal squares — so the corners and edges have their own logic. On mine, a piece controls four straight squares — so the whole geometry of danger moves.” He demonstrated: a piece that would be perfectly safe from a diagonal attacker was suddenly threatened by a straight one, and vice versa. “It’s not harder or easier,” he said. “It’s rewired. Every ‘safe square’ you memorized on the diagonal board is a different square here. You can’t port your habits. You have to see fresh.” The master, who wanted students to feel a familiar thing become strange, said quietly, “You didn’t teach them a new rule. You made them doubt an old one they thought was permanent.”

In his workshop he teaches students to hold their assumptions loosely. A girl came in flustered: “I keep trying to move diagonally out of habit and it’s not allowed and it’s frustrating.” Ordell nodded warmly. “Of course you do,” he said. “You didn’t learn ‘checkers moves diagonally’ as a rule. You learned it as a reflex — so deep you forgot it was ever a choice. That’s exactly what Turkish draughts is for.” He set up a fresh board. “The frustration you feel? That’s the sound of a reflex being pulled up to the surface so you can look at it. Most people carry a hundred reflexes they’ve never examined — ‘this is just how it’s done.’ A variant is a gift, because it takes one of those buried reflexes and makes it visible by breaking it.” He smiled. “Once you’ve had to consciously move straight instead of automatically moving diagonal, you’ll never again assume the basic rule of anything is the only one possible.”

The girl practiced until straight stopped feeling wrong and started feeling like a language she was learning — and admitted the diagonal game looked different to her now too, more like a choice and less like a law.

Later the girl asked the question. “But if you can change any rule, isn’t it all just… arbitrary? How do you know which variant is the ‘real’ game?”

Ordell smiled, because it was the deep question under all the others. “None of them is ‘the real one,’” he said. “And that’s not scary — it’s freeing. Diagonal checkers, Turkish straight-checkers, the big International board — they’re a family, not a hierarchy. Each one keeps the heart — take turns, capture by jumping, race to promote — and changes one big thing, and each change grows a whole tree of new tactics.” He tapped the straight-moving board. “The point of learning more than one isn’t to find the ‘correct’ checkers. It’s to learn that the rules are made of choices, all the way down — and once you feel that, you stop being a person who only follows games and start being a person who can understand them, compare them, even invent them.” He leaned back. “A house that’s only ever seen one room thinks the world is that room. Open one more door and you know, forever, that there are always more doors.”

The girl went home and, that night, caught herself doing something “the only way it’s done,” paused, and asked — for the first time in her life — who decided that, and is there another way?