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.
Stratego is a strategy board game for two players on a board of 10×10 squares. Each player controls 40 pieces representing individual officer and soldier ranks in an army. The pieces have Napoleonic insignia. The objective of the game is to either find and capture the opponent's Flag or to capture so many enemy pieces that the opponent cannot make any further moves. Stratego has simple enough rules for young children to play but a depth of strategy that is also appealing to adults.
The queen is the most powerful piece in the game of chess. It can move any number of squares vertically, horizontally or diagonally, combining the powers of the rook and bishop. Each player starts the game with one queen, placed in the middle of the first rank next to the king. Because the queen is the strongest piece, a pawn is promoted to a queen in the vast majority of cases.
A chess piece, or chessman, is a game piece that is placed on a chessboard to play the game of chess. It can be either white or black, and it can be one of six types: king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, or pawn.
The pawn is the most numerous and weakest piece in the game of chess. It may move one square directly forward, it may move two squares directly forward on its first move, and it may capture one square diagonally forward. Each player begins a game with eight pawns, one on each square of their second rank. The white pawns start on a2 through h2; the black pawns start on a7 through h7.
The rules of chess govern the play of the game of chess. Chess is a two-player abstract strategy board game. Each player controls sixteen pieces of six types on a chessboard. Each type of piece moves in a distinct way. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king; checkmate occurs when a king is threatened with capture and has no escape. A game can end in various ways besides checkmate: a player can resign, and there are several ways a game can end in a draw.
Checkers, also known as draughts, is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers is developed from alquerque. The term "checkers" derives from the checkered board which the game is played on, whereas "draughts" derives from the verb "to draw" or "to move".
Shatranj is an old form of chess, as played in the Sasanian Empire. Its origins lie in the Indian game of chaturanga. Modern chess gradually developed from this game, as it was introduced to Europe by contacts in Muslim Al-Andalus and in Sicily in the 10th century. In modern Persian, the term is also used as the translation of chess.
Mak-yek is a two-player abstract strategy board game played in Thailand and Myanmar. Players move their pieces as in the rook in chess and attempt to capture their opponent's pieces through custodian and intervention capture. The game may have been first described in literature by Captain James Low a writing contributor in the 1839 work Asiatic Researches; or, Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, For Inquiring into The History, The Antiquities, The Arts and Sciences, and Literature of Asian, Second Part of the Twentieth Volume in which he wrote chapter X On Siamese Literature and documented the game as Maak yék. Another early description of the game is by H.J.R. Murray in his 1913 work A History of Chess, and the game was written as Maak-yek.
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 as it can be noted in the list of fairy chess pieces.
Martian Chess is an abstract strategy game for two or four players invented by Andrew Looney in 1999. It is played with Icehouse pyramids on a chessboard. To play with a number of players other than two or four, a non-Euclidean surface can be tiled to produce a board of the required size, allowing up to six players.
Makruk, or Thai chess, is a strategy board game that is descended from the 6th-century Indian game of chaturanga or a close relative thereof, and is therefore related to chess. It is part of the family of chess variants.
Chu shogi is a strategy board game native to Japan. It is similar to modern shogi in its rules and gameplay. Its name means "mid-sized shogi", from a time when there were three sizes of shogi variants that were regularly being played. Chu shogi seems to have been developed in the early 14th century as a derivative of dai shogi. There are earlier references, but it is not clear that they refer to the game as we now know it.
Jetan, also known as Martian chess, is a chess variant first published in 1922. It was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs as a game played on Barsoom, his fictional version of Mars. The game was introduced in The Chessmen of Mars, the fifth book in the Barsoom series. Its rules are described in Chapter 2 and in the Appendix of the book, with an actual game partly described in Chapter 17.
Circular chess is a chess variant played using the standard set of pieces on a circular board consisting of four rings, each of sixteen squares. This is topologically equivalent to playing on the curved surface of a cylinder.
In chess, an exchange or trade of chess pieces is a series of closely related moves, typically sequential, in which the two players capture each other's pieces. Any type of pieces except the kings may possibly be exchanged, i.e. captured in an exchange, although a king can capture an opponent's piece. Either the player of the white or the black pieces may make the first capture of the other player's piece in an exchange, followed by the other player capturing a piece of the first player, often referred to as a recapture. Commonly, the word "exchange" is used when the pieces exchanged are of the same type or of about equal value, which is an even exchange. According to chess tactics, a bishop and a knight are usually of about equal value. If the values of the pieces exchanged are not equal, then the player who captures the higher-valued piece can be said to be up the exchange or wins the exchange, while the opponent who captures the lower-valued piece is down the exchange or loses the exchange. Exchanges occur very frequently in chess, in almost every game and usually multiple times per game. Exchanges are often related to the tactics or strategy in a chess game, but often simply occur over the course of a game.
Courier chess is a chess variant that dates from the 12th century and was popular for at least 600 years. It was a part of the slow evolution towards modern chess from Medieval Chess.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to chess:
Infinite chess is any variation of the game of chess played on an unbounded chessboard. Versions of infinite chess have been introduced independently by multiple players, chess theorists, and mathematicians, both as a playable game and as a model for theoretical study. It has been found that even though the board is unbounded, there are ways in which a player can win the game in a finite number of moves.
