A chess variant is a game related to, derived from, or inspired by chess. [1] Such variants can differ from chess in many different ways.
"International" or "Western" chess itself is one of a family of games which have related origins and could be considered variants of each other. Chess developed from chaturanga , from which other members of this family, such as ouk chatrang , shatranj , Tamerlane chess, shogi , and xiangqi also evolved. [2]
Many chess variants are designed to be played with the equipment of regular chess. [3] Most variants have a similar public-domain status as their parent game, but some have been made into commercial proprietary games. Just as in traditional chess, chess variants can be played over the board, by correspondence, or by computer. Some internet chess servers facilitate the play of some variants in addition to orthodox chess.
In the context of chess problems, chess variants are called heterodox chess or fairy chess. [4] [5] Fairy chess variants tend to be created for problem composition rather than actual play.
There are thousands of known chess variants (see list of chess variants). The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants catalogues around two thousand, with the preface noting that—since creating a chess variant is relatively trivial—many were considered insufficiently notable for inclusion. [6]
The origins of the chess family of games can be traced to the game of chaturanga during the time of the Gupta Empire in India. [2] Over time, as the game spread geographically, modified versions of the rules became popular in different regions. In Sassanid Persia, a slightly modified form became known as shatranj . Modifications made to this game in Europe resulted in the modern game. Courier chess was a popular variant in medieval Europe, which had a significant impact on the "main" variant's development. [2]
Other games in the chess family, such as shogi (Japan), xiangqi (China), and ouk chatran (Cambodian) are also developments from chaturanga made in other regions. These related games are considered chess variants[ citation needed ], though the majority of variants are, expressly, modifications of chess. The basic rules of chess were not standardized until the 19th century, and the history of chess before this involves many variants, with the most popular modifications spreading and eventually forming the modern game.
While some regional variants have historical origins comparable to or even older than chess, the majority of variants are express attempts by individuals or small groups to create new games with chess as a starting point. In most cases the creators are attempting to create new games of interest to chess enthusiasts or a wider audience. Variants normally have the same public domain status as chess, though a few (such as Knightmare Chess) are proprietary, and the materials for play are released as commercial products.
The variations from chess may be done to address a perceived issue with the standard game. For example, Fischer random chess, which randomises the starting positions, was invented by Bobby Fischer to combat what he perceived to be the detrimental dominance of opening preparation in chess. [8] Several variants introduce complications to the standard game, providing an additional challenge for experienced players, for example in Kriegspiel, where players cannot see the pieces of their opponent.
The table below details some, but not all, of the ways in which variants can differ from the orthodox game:
Difference from regular chess | Example variant |
---|---|
Different starting position | Fischer random chess –starting position randomly selected from 960 possible options |
Non-standard pieces | Almost chess –uses chancellors (which can move as a rook or a knight) instead of queens |
Different victory conditions | Losing chess –objective is to lose all one's pieces |
Players have incomplete information regarding the game state | Kriegspiel –players cannot see the pieces of their opponent, and have to deduce or guess where they are likely to be |
Elements of chance | Dice chess –dice rolls determine which pieces can move on a turn |
Non-identical setup for white and black | Dunsany's chess –pits a regular chess army versus a large army consisting only of pawns |
Different sized or shaped board | Infinite chess –the board is unbounded |
Multiple boards | Alice chess –pieces switch between the two boards when they move |
More dimensions in which pieces can move | Three-dimensional chess –playing board is in three dimensions |
Board other than lattice of squares | Triangular chess –playing board is 96 triangular cells |
Non-standard number of players | Quatrochess –played with four players |
Different rules | Crazyhouse –the captured pieces can be dropped on the board as one's own |
Variants can themselves be developed into further sub-variants, for example Horde chess is a variation upon Dunsany's Chess. [9]
Some variations are created for the purpose of composing interesting puzzles, rather than being intended for full games. This field of composition is known as fairy chess.
Fairy chess gave rise to the term "fairy chess piece" which is used more broadly across writings about chess variants to describe chess pieces with movement rules other than those of the standard chess pieces. Forms of standardised notation have been devised to systematically describe the movement of these. A distinguishing feature of several chess variants is the presence of one or more fairy pieces. Physical models of common fairy pieces are sold by major chess set suppliers. [10]
Several chess masters have developed variants, such as Chess960 by Bobby Fischer, Capablanca Chess by José Raúl Capablanca, and Seirawan chess by Yasser Seirawan.
Individuals notable for creating multiple chess variants include V. R. Parton (best known for Alice chess), Ralph Betza, Philip M. Cohen and George R. Dekle Sr.
Some board game designers, notable for works across a wider range of board games, have created chess variants. These include Robert Abbott (Baroque chess) and Andy Looney (Martian chess).
While chess, shogi, and xiangqi have professional circuits as well as many organised tournaments for amateurs, play of chess variants is predominately on a casual basis.
A few variants have had significant tournaments. Several Gliński's hexagonal chess tournaments were played at the height of the variant's popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. Chess960 has also been the subject of tournaments, including in 2018 an "unofficial world championship" between reigning World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen and fellow high-ranking Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. [11] Likewise Crazyhouse has seen prize-funded unofficial world championship tournaments with top grandmasters and experts of the game on chess.com and lichess.
Several internet chess servers facilitate live play of popular variants, including Chess.com, [12] Lichess, [13] and the Free Internet Chess Server. [14] The software packages Zillions of Games and Fairy-Max have been programmed to support many chess variants. [15] [16]
Some chess engines are also able to play a handful of variants, for instance the version of Stockfish implemented on Lichess is able to play Crazyhouse, King-of-the-hill, Three-check chess, Atomic chess, Horde chess, and Racing Kings. [17] The AI included in Zillions of Games is able to play almost any variant correctly programmed within it to a reasonable standard. [16] Some variants, such as 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel, are implausible or even impossible to play physically and exist primarily as video games.
Play in most chess variants is sufficiently similar to chess that games can be recorded with algebraic notation, although additions to this are often required. For example, the third dimension in Millennium 3D Chess means that move notation needs to include the level number, as well as the rank and file—N2g3 means a knight move to the g3 square on the second level. When fairy chess pieces are used, notation requires assigning letters for those pieces.
Various publications have been written regarding chess variants. Variant Chess magazine was published from 1990 to 2010, being an official publication of the British Chess Variants Society from 1997. This outlined and introduced multiple variants, as well as containing in-depth analyses. [18]
A leading figure in the field was David Pritchard, who authored several books on the topic. Most significantly, he compiled an encyclopedia of variants which outlined thousands of different games. Following Pritchard's death in 2005, the second edition of the encyclopedia was completed and published by John Beasley under the title The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants. [19]
A recent overview of historical and some modern variants was published under the title of A World of Chess in 2017. [20]
The Chess Variant Pages website includes a constantly expanding catalogue of variants.
A few chess variants have been the subject of significant computational analysis. Los Alamos chess, a 6×6 variant, was created in 1956 expressly for computers, its simplicity meant that it was possible for the MANIAC I computer to play it, with a victory over a beginner player the first instance of a computer winning a chess-like game against human opposition. [21] Conversely, Arimaa was developed in 2003 to be deliberately resistant to computer analysis while easy for human players, though computers were able to comprehensively surpass human players by 2015. [22]
While solving chess has not yet been achieved, some variants have been found to be simple enough to be solved though computer analysis. The 5×5 Gardner's Minichess variant has been weakly solved as a draw, [23] and a lengthy analysis of losing chess managed to weakly solve this as a win for white. [24]
Chess variants have been invented in various fiction. [25] In The Chessmen of Mars author Edgar Rice Burroughs describes Jetan which depicts a war between two races of Martian. An appendix fully defines the rules of the game. More commonly specifics of fictional variants are not detailed in the original works, though several have been codified into playable games by fans. An example of this is Tri-Dimensional Chess from Star Trek . On-screen play was not conducted to any specific rules, but a comprehensive rulebook has been since developed. [2] Another well known example of fictional chess-like game are the Star Wars holochess, or dejarik. [26]
Chess boxing, a hybrid sport of chess and boxing, was depicted in Froid Équateur , a 1992 comic by Enki Bilal and was developed into a real sport in the early 21st century.
Fictional chess variants can involve fantastical or dangerous elements that cannot be implemented in real life. The Chessmen of Mars describes a form of Jetan where the pieces are human beings and captures are replaced by fights to the death between them. The Doctor Who episode "The Wedding of River Song" depicts "Live Chess", which introduces potentially lethal electric currents into the game.
Shogi, also known as Japanese chess, is a strategy board game for two players. It is one of the most popular board games in Japan and is in the same family of games as Western chess, chaturanga, xiangqi, Indian chess, and janggi. Shōgi means general's board game.
Losing chess is one of the most popular chess variants. The objective of each player is to lose all of their pieces or be stalemated, that is, a misère version. In some variations, a player may also win by checkmating or by being checkmated.
Capablanca chess is a chess variant invented in the 1920s by World Chess Champion José Raúl Capablanca. It incorporates two new pieces and is played on a 10×8 board. Capablanca believed that chess would be played out in a few decades. This threat of "draw death" for chess was his main motivation for creating a more complex version of the game.
Chaturanga is an ancient Indian strategy board game. While there is some uncertainty, the prevailing view among chess historians is that it is the common ancestor of the board games chess, xiangqi (Chinese), janggi (Korean), shogi (Japanese), sittuyin (Burmese), makruk (Thai), ouk chatrang (Cambodian) and modern Indian chess.
Grand Chess is a large-board chess variant invented by Dutch games designer Christian Freeling in 1984. It is played on a 10×10 board, with each side having two additional pawns and two new pieces: the marshal and the cardinal.
A fairy chess piece, variant chess piece, unorthodox chess piece, or heterodox chess piece is a chess piece not used in conventional chess but incorporated into certain chess variants and some chess problems. Compared to conventional pieces, fairy pieces vary mostly in the way they move, but they may also follow special rules for capturing, promotions, etc. Because of the distributed and uncoordinated nature of unorthodox chess development, the same piece can have different names, and different pieces can have the same name in various contexts. Most are symbolised as inverted or rotated icons of the standard pieces in diagrams, and the meanings of these "wildcards" must be defined in each context separately. Pieces invented for use in chess variants rather than problems sometimes instead have special icons designed for them, but with some exceptions, many of these are not used beyond the individual games for which they were invented.
Abstract strategy games in contrast to strategy games in general usually have no or minimal narrative theme, outcomes determined only by player choice, and all players have perfect information about the game. For example, Go is a pure abstract strategy game since it fulfills all three criteria; chess and related games are nearly so but feature a recognizable theme of ancient warfare; and Stratego is borderline since it is deterministic, loosely based on 19th-century Napoleonic warfare, and features concealed information.
Crazyhouse is a chess variant in which captured enemy pieces can be reintroduced, or dropped, into the game as one's own. It was derived as a two-player, single-board variant of bughouse chess.
In chess, promotion is the replacement of a pawn with a new piece when the pawn is moved to its last rank. The player replaces the pawn immediately with a queen, rook, bishop, or knight of the same color. The new piece does not have to be a previously captured piece. Promotion is mandatory; the pawn cannot remain as a pawn.
The history of chess can be traced back nearly 1,500 years to its earliest known predecessor, called chaturanga, in India; its prehistory is the subject of speculation. From India it spread to Persia, where it was modified in terms of shapes and rules and developed into Shatranj. Following the Arab invasion and conquest of Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Europe via Spain and Italy. The game evolved roughly into its current form by about 1500 CE.
The grasshopper is a fairy chess piece that moves along ranks, files, and diagonals but only by hopping over another piece. The piece to be hopped may be any distance away, but the grasshopper must land on the square immediately beyond it in the same direction. If there is no piece to hop over, it cannot move. If the square beyond a piece is occupied by a piece of the opposite color, the grasshopper can capture that piece. The grasshopper may jump over pieces of either color; the piece being jumped over is unaffected.
Zillions of Games is a commercial general game playing system developed by Jeff Mallett and Mark Lefler in 1998. The game rules are specified with S-expressions, Zillions rule language. It was designed to handle mostly abstract strategy board games or puzzles. After parsing the rules of the game, the system's artificial intelligence can automatically play one or more players. It treats puzzles as solitaire games and its AI can be used to solve them.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to chess:
Dragonfly is a chess variant invented by Christian Freeling in 1983. There are no queens, and a captured bishop, knight, or rook becomes the property of the capturer, who may play it as their own on a turn to any open square. The board is 7×7 squares, or alternatively a 61-cell hexagon with two additional pawns per side.
Chesquerque is a chess variant invented by George R. Dekle Sr. in 1986. The game is played on a board composed of four Alquerque boards combined into a square. Like Alquerque, pieces are positioned on points of intersection and make their moves along marked lines ; as such, the board comprises a 9×9 grid with 81 positions (points) that pieces can move to.
Congo is a chess variant invented by Demian Freeling in 1982 when he was nearly 8 years old. His father encouraged him to design a variant using a 7×7 gameboard. Demian was already familiar with chess and xiangqi, and the result blends some features from both. Congo became the second-most popular chess variant at the Fanaat games club in Enschede, the Netherlands.
The Chess Variant Pages is a non-commercial website devoted to chess variants. It was created by Hans Bodlaender in 1995. The site is "run by hobbyists for hobbyists" and is "the most wide-ranging and authoritative web site on chess variants".
Game of the Seven Kingdoms is a seven-player variant of the game xiangqi. It is traditionally ascribed to Sima Guang, although he died well before the 13th century, to which this game is traditionally dated. The rules of the game can be found in his book, 古局象棋圖. There is skepticism regarding the game's 13th-century formulation.
Fairy-Max is a free and open source chess engine which can play orthodox chess as well as chess variants. Among its features is the ability of users to define and use their own custom variant chess pieces for use in games.
Many Chess variants, particularly those called Modest variants, can be played with a regular Chess set.
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