Gess

Gess is an abstract strategy board game for two players, involving a grid board and mutating pieces. The name was chosen as a conflation of "chess" and "Go". It is pronounced with a hard "g" as in "Go", and is thus homophonous with "guess". Gess was created by the Puzzles and Games Ring of The Archimedeans, and first published in 1994 in the society's journal Eureka. It was popularized by Ian Stewart's Mathematical Recreations column in the November 1994 issue of Scientific American.