A short Internet search later and I found this page:
www.boardgames.com/designer/david-crockett
On that page is shows (yes!) Beyond Chess as one of five games designed by the same person. The other games credited include StarRunners, WreckTangle, Lieber Nachbar, and Reach. And of course Beyond Chess, described on this site as follows:
Beyond Chess is a chess variant that uses a modular gameboard that actually shifts during play. Rather than playing on an 8×8 grid, the game is played on 64 movable squares.
Players can move pieces as well as game squares, causing an ever changing landscape of movement possibilities. Furthermore, it is possible to entirely isolate an opponent’s playing piece, thus rendering it immobile.
Now here’s the weird part. When I went back to the page today, none of those other four games were listed. 😕 Instead of five games there is only one. What’s going on?
My favorite board game resource (Board Game Geek) has a page for David Crockett but it’s empty. Ditto for Wikipedia. Board Game Geek (often abbreviated to BGG) lists both StarRunners and WreckTangle as entries for the Ice Game Design competition but they are credited to different designers! I guess maybe someone at BoardGames.com was told their page is inaccurate, and as of today it only shows Beyond Chess.
The rabbit hole continues. At this point I have exhausted my Internet search skills. I have posted questions on Board Game Geek and on Facebook. Maybe I’m the only one interested at this point. 🙂 It just seems weird that with so much information available to us today, nuggets of data about this particular game seem to be particularly sparse.
If you have anything else that I haven’t found yet, please let me know in the comments!