Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic presents a series of "Proposals for New Chess Pieces," each with a humorous illustration and movement rules:

1. Bishop Kicker -- Moves like the king. When next to a bishop, you may choose to move that bishop to any adjacent square. (A piece whose sole purpose is to harass bishops.)

2. Bureaucrat -- Can only move from current square back to current square, without interfering with pieces in between. (A piece that literally does nothing.)

3. Wilderness Preserver -- Moves like the king. Any space touched by the Wilderness Preserver is no longer usable by other pieces. (A piece that destroys the board as it moves.)

4. Communist -- Moves like the bishop. If you remove your Communist from the game, for the next three turns all pieces on equal sharing become pawns. (A piece that enforces radical equality by making everything equally weak.)

5. Cranky Spy -- Moves like the pawn. When on board, you can peek at the other player'''s pieces. (Useless because chess is a game of perfect information -- all pieces are already visible.)

6. Gortak, the World-Eater -- Remove three squares you control from the game to summon Gortak. If Gortak enters a game, nobody ever wins -- ever again. (A piece so overpowered that it renders all games, past and future, meaningless.)

The Humor

Each proposed chess piece satirizes a different real-world archetype or concept by translating it into absurd game mechanics. The Bureaucrat is a perfect parody of bureaucratic inefficiency -- it exists on the board but accomplishes nothing. The Wilderness Preserver satirizes extreme environmentalism by making conservation efforts destroy the usability of the spaces being "preserved." The Communist forces equality by making everything into the weakest piece. The Cranky Spy is funny because chess is already a game of complete information, making espionage pointless. The escalation to Gortak, the World-Eater -- an eldritch horror that permanently ends all chess games everywhere -- provides an absurd climax that parodies overpowered game pieces and apocalyptic stakes.

References

The comic plays on the formal structure of chess piece descriptions, mimicking the way chess variants and fairy chess pieces are typically presented. Fairy chess is a real tradition of inventing new pieces with novel movement rules, though the pieces here are deliberately impractical. The Communist piece references the Marxist ideal of classless equality. Gortak, the World-Eater, evokes Lovecraftian cosmic horror and fantasy gaming tropes of world-ending entities.