David Pritchard

David Brine Pritchard (19 October 1919 – 12 December 2005) was a British chess player, chess writer and indoor games consultant. He gained pre-eminence as an indoor games and mind sports consultant, a role that he in effect created. A natural games player, it was to him that inventors or publishers would turn to organise a championship of a new game, write about it or generally promote it.

Writer Pritchard's earliest writings were chess texts for beginners. Begin Chess and The Right Way to Play Chess, first published in the 1950s, have since sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Books

The Right Way to Play Chess (orig pub. 1950; 2000), Play Chess (1960), Begin Chess (1970), Go: A Guide to the Game (1973), Puzzles and Teasers for Everyone (Ed., 1974) Modern Board Games (Ed., 1975), Oriental Board Games (booklet, 1977), Puzzles and Teasers for the Easy Chair (orig pub. 1977; 1988), Brain Games: The World's Best Games for Two (1982), Five-Minute Games (1984), Puzzles for Geniuses (1984), Puzzles for Geniuses: Vol II (with Darryl Francis Pritchard, 1984), ASIN B000OIWREU First Moves: How to Start a Chess Game (1986), Beginning Chess (1992), The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants (1994), The Family Book of Games (1994), Card Games (booklet, 1995), Patience Games (with David Parlett, 1996), Popular Chess Variants (2000), Honeycomb Chess (with Douglas Graham Reid, 2002), The New Mahjong: The International Game (2004), A Family Book of Games (2007), Teach Yourself Mahjong (2007), The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants (2007),

British Chess Variants Society The British Chess Variants Society (or BCVS) was an association of chess variant players and developers formally active between 1997 and 2010, and Pritchard was its inaugural president.

Starting in 1996, the Society (at the time only provisionally constituted) published Variant Chess , a quarterly chess variant magazine. (The magazine predated the formation of the Society, having been established by chess writer George Jelliss in 1990. ) The Society also established a chess variant library containing some 120 subject items in a variety of languages.