short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Game of Bounds

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

In the quiet of my study I let the rigid borders of a simple board game become a loom for verses. The endgame of chess taught me that every pawn can be a thread, and the iterative loops of the Prisoner's Dilemma showed that restraint breeds daring choices. With 23% of a text still unread, I set a limit: only 4 moves allowed, then measured success by 2.12 points per round. Those constraints forced my mind to weave new patterns, turning scarcity into a creative pulse.