Probably there is never any way of demonstrating the intrinsic superiority of one game over another. Yet the long history and the wide prestige of the game of chess do suggest that it enjoys some ad-vantage over other board games of mental combat. And indeed one very special merit can be readily examined. This consists in the kind of complexity built into the conventions which constitute the rules and aim of chess. Other board games, Japanese" Go," Hawaiian Checkers, the pebble-in-hole game of Oh-Wah-Ree, or any of the board-and-peg" war" games which proliferate at the Christmas season, may have an extraordinary degree of complexity and difficulty. But this is like the complexity of a beehive or perhaps like that of a computer machine, the multiplication of a great many similar binary choices. Hundreds of cells or pegs or beans in little holes, but all

'At Christmas 1966 I printed privately and distributed to a small number of" friends in chess" a pamphlet bearing the above title. In this little book, attempting a revival and re-celebration of a long quiescent but once obsessive hobby, I presented, with commentary, anecdotal and analytic, a selection of my own original chess problems published mainly between 1933 and 1946 in American and British chess journals. The general Introduction and a concluding" Note for Literary Critics" are published here with a few revisions and additions. The chief of the latter is No. 7" For Literary Critics," a note on originality and development in problems.