looking for a small sci fi book

[frankiepereda]

Hello, I have been looking for a small, 5x5 book that has a green and orange chess pieces on the front cover, I have a hard time remembering much about it, I believe it is called the game and i kind of remember the plot, aliens have invaded earth and challenged the humans to a game, the book size it could fit the palm of a hand and it might have been released in the early 2000s, it was also part of a mini series of other sci fi books as well. here is a picture of the chess pieces and I know that those are the exact chess pieces that were on the front cover.

https://abstoragev4.blob.core.windows...


please help me find that book, and also please share this with others too for they may know of it, thank you.

 

[Ravensquawk]

Well, there's answering with stories you know; and there's taking a wild stab out of curiosity.
This is the latter.

I downloaded the image into Goooggle Images. No dice. Or rather no chess set. Except people posting chess sets for sale.

Since searching by cover art has eluded me, even with some good sites collecting cover art, I tried in the aforementioned Images: "science fiction cover art with green orange chess set".

That got a better result than asking for books -- asking for books got lots of books about how to play chess.

It was gratifying to see "Unicorn Variations" there. So it's at least roughly on target.

That was after searching on ISFDB for a fiction title of simply "The Game".
You can see that the results have more extensive titles with that phrase in them too.

Even after seeing the word "chapbook" for a decade or two, I hadn't gotten around to thinking clearly that the word denotes the small book you described.

So I did a "CTRL-F" and searched for "chapbook" in the ISFDB list. Most of them are nearly 20 years more recent than early 2000s, but have a look.

You could do the same search for the "shortfiction", or just the simple title (as opposed to, say, "The Game of Rat and Dragon").

(Did that simply because even if you have an account and do an advanced search, at least in my Linux browser, you couldn't sort the "Type" column for just "chapbook" or "shortfiction".)

Then if you find a possible title, the listing will show you all the cover art.

 

[Orcadian]

Never heard the term 'chapbook' before, so looked it up. The ethymology is quite interesting:

Chapbook is first attested in English in 1824. It derives from chapman, an itinerant salesman who sold such books. The first element of chapman comes from Old English cēap, meaning 'barter', 'business', 'dealing', from which the modern adjective cheap is derived.

Chapbooks correspond to Spanish cordel (string) and French bibliothèque bleue (blue library) literature, the latter because the books were often wrapped in cheap blue paper usually used to wrap sugar. Chapbooks are called Volksbuch (people's book) in German, and pliegos sueltos (loose sheets) in Spanish, with the latter name referring to their method of assembly. Lubok is the Russian equivalent. (Wiki [Lightly edited by me for brevity and punctuation.])