Variant Chess: Difference between revisions

** A similar game from the same people is [http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Andy/Games/monochess.html Monochrome Chess]; the same idea of a board that has been divided and you only control the pieces in your territory, but it uses regular chess pieces rather than icehouse pyramids. All sorts of recursive game development going on...

* Homeworlds, which also uses Icehouse game pieces, simulates combat on the scale of star systems. [http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Andy/Games/ILoveHomeworlds.html#TheTrueSpaceChess This page] posits that Homeworlds is the true "Space Chess" because it is an abstraction of space warfare in a way that other variants are not (it even talks about a few of the other examples on this page).

* [http://www.intuitor.com/forchess/ Forchess]: four-player, two-on-two chess (and it also has a free-for-all version using the same rules).

* Tile Chess, where the board is made of multiple free-standing tiles, thus allowing a non-standard board that keeps changing shape, and allows up to ''six'' players at the same time. It's very fun.

* [http://www.omegachess.com/ Omega Chess] deserves special mention as it gives the impression of actually having the intent to take the place in mainstream board-games on which [[Chess]] has historically held a monopoly.

* Games like [[Shogi]] (Japanese chess) and [[Xiangqi]] (Chinese chess) are related and similar to international chess; both Western/international chess and these games themselves started as variants of the Indian game ''chaturanga''. Some of these games, like makruk (Thai chess) can be played on an international chess board with the same pieces.

* Byzantine chess, which is played on a round board instead of a square one, was created after Pope John VII declared chess the product of "pagans" and banned its play from Christian lands. The monks who invented Byzantine Chess reasoned that, as the circle was a symbol of the sun, and thus a symbol of God, a circular board could not be "pagan". They got away with it.

* Alice in Wonderland chess, which uses two boards, one of which is initially empty. Each piece, immediately after its move, "teleports" to the corresponding square of the other board (the move has to be legal before the "teleportation" and you can't move to a square if the corresponding square on the other board is occupied). This creates bizarre situations, e.g. if you want to protect your king from a check by moving a piece in front of the king, the moving piece needs to start its move on the board without the king. This, and other quirks of the game, make traditional defence useless and allows for some attacks impossible in traditional chess (for example, thanks to the fact that the same square on both boards can never be occupied, moving behind enemy lines is much easier).

* ''Guide to Fairy Chess'' by Anthony Stewart Mackay Dickins (1971). A good history of a particular group of non-standard chess problems, pieces, and boards played since the late 19th Century, and their evolution and additions through the 20th Century.

* Tafl variants, in particular Hnefatafl (King's Table) are asymmetric and more like checkers with King.

 

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