Imagine a set of 5 chess boards, one in the centre, and four others overlapping by four corner squares on it
Players would sit in a
AB
CD
with a standard placement of chess pieces in front of them of four different colours (ie: black, white , red, green)
as in standard chess, the object is to win by checkmating the opponents’ kings
Is this interesting to anyone? Has any one ever seen a variation like this.
Any ideas on how this would affect game play?
Your thoughts please
FML
What’s your pawn promotion rule going to be?
-FrL-
I was envisioning that board, but with the pieces arranged in a radially symmetric fashion.
Not sure if that’s what the OP intended though.
Either way, pawn promotion is a problem.
-FrL-
Hadn’t thought of that. Interesting.
Radial-style positioning.
I agree. Like other multi-player boards with lot’s of real estate, knights get screwed, too.
Yes, pawn promotion would be a big problem in that setup, and that is why usually the 4 player variation has this setup:
Here is a Java applet to check how it works:
A very similar game to what you propose (or possibly the exact same, depending on how you’re ‘overlapping’) was(is?) sold as Chess[sup]4[/sup]. The area where each player starts is four deep, and then the middle area is a regular sized board.
The rules of that game where that pawn promotion could be on any terminal edge (that is, at the back of the three starting areas for the other players. Theoretically a pawn could be stuck (along the right player’s right sunken edge, or the left player’s left sunken edge; perhaps promotion was allowed then). In any case, promotion was exceedingly rare.
Some general observations :
The game as a whole becomes more tactical, especially in an ‘every man for himself’ game.
Bishops are very powerful; at least as powerful as rooks. In the four-deep variation, they start out in a vastly stronger position.
Knights are correspondingly weakened, but make good defensive players, and their cornering ability is a plus.
The center is nearly worthless, unless it comes down to an endgame, and that is rare.
Four-player chess is amenable to team play (and in my opinion the best way to play):
Play proceeds around the board in order, alternating teammates (clockwise is traditional).
In team play, your partner sits opposite you, and you cannot speak to them during the game (at least as far as collaboration is concerned; we usually allowed oblique chatter as long as it was not your team’s move).
Checkmate (on you) does not occur until the player just before you has moved. This means that your partner can ‘save’ you from checkmate from the player after you (but they still must move out of check if in it, and you can’t deliberately enter check even if your teammate could save you).
The first player on a team to lose their king is not eliminated. Instead, they use a move to remove the king, and then continue to play as normal, only losing if their teammate loses. This is the rule that makes the game interesting.
Another four-player version (tougher to play, but a bit more interesting) is Doubles Chess. Imagine a board with four cuts from the center to the side dividing it into quadrants. A similarly cut board is spliced to it (imagine them as intersecting at right angles, and that you can move ‘diagonally’ to the opposite side of ‘your board’, and that’s sort of it). This was sold as a 2-d board with the squares distorted, and it’s really hard to figure out how to properly move.
Yes, exactly
(nice work, and thank you by the way!)
Thanks FML
Bishops become obviously power players… pawn promotion becomes a rare instance, knights tend to become defensive players ,castle/rooks become just plain wierd (use them for defense, offense, or just boarder guards?)
alliegiances betrween players become signifigant (players a and b gand up on player d, while player c lets them weaken their forces… etc)
I didn’t think of it (this was a what if forum)… butcheckmated players being allowed to continue their play… (would they have to proclaim an aliance?)… woah…
I don’t like the compressed board… too much going on to see
regards, and keep the ideas coming
fml
how about this… if player “A” gets checkmated, all his pieces get A) removed from the board, or b) Treated as Dead Squares (unable to use them in remainder of play, or C) Pieces can not move, but must be taken by other players to claim the squares they occupy?..
?
FML
My pleasure.
How’s this? It’s tighter by overlapping 9 squares instead of 4. I added a hole in the center to make things more difficult for bishops.
Two pawn-promoting solutions:
In our case, the teams are decided beforehand. The ability to keep playing after checkmate becomes a necessity, since two teams working together can checkmate a single player fairly easily at the start. When I used to play this, the first time our usual opponents figured out the strategy, we were blown away (because unprepared, you can beat both players in just a few moves). It actually can be a strategy of sort to kill off your king early so that your pieces are completely free for offensive (or alternately, send a few extra defenders to your teammate).
Also, I misremembered - it is only three squares deep, as in the other links to the four-way chess shown.
It seems that pawns in your corner variation aren’t much good. What about this - set up the pawns on the fourth rank, around a corner. There’s four facing the opposite player, and four facing the left-hand player. This leaves a diagonal open, but the version with the hole in the center provides initial protection. The only problem is you need to keep track of which pawns move which way.
Another variation (in the smaller board) that sort of works is the variable piece placement (I think Bobby Fisher came up with this) - the back pieces are set up in an alternate order (either random, or each player putting one down at a time).
I favor a rule that the king must actually be captured, not just checkmated. In normal chess, it doesn’t actually make a difference, and the “no capture of the king” thing is just a symbolic gesture. But in many chess variants, it does matter, and I don’t think that a token of elitist respect towards monarchy is a good reason to change gameplay. In a 4-player chess game, for instance, the mating player might decide that the mated player is weak enough anyway, and that e shouldn’t waste a move on the capture, but instead continue es assault on some other opponent, and come back to that king later. Or e might try to broker a deal with the other player: Attack only the other opponents, and I’ll let you live. Or, of course, another player might rescue a mated king before the capture, as others mentioned.
Thanks for all the great ideas everyone… keep em comin’!
Chronos gave me a thought… If B captures A’s king, B takes control of A’s pieces…
I like the hole in the middle… It does “hobble” the bishops (and queens)
regards
FML
There’s a problem that most multi-player chess variants face. Normal chess is a game of relative advantage - it makes sense to make a play that eliminates the opponent’s queen at the cost of a rook or a rook for a knight or a knight for a pawn. In all of these exchanges, both players lost material but one player gained an advantage because he lost less material than the other did.
But in a multi-player game that’s no real advantage. If the red player captures the blue queen and loses his own rook, red is now stronger than blue. But both are weaker than green and yellow which stayed out of the exchange. So in multi-player games, the smartest strategy is to play defensively and let the other players fight. But when every player has the same strategy of waiting for the other players to take the offensive, you get an endless game.
To avoid this impasse, you need a rules tweak. You incorporate shogi style rules to your game. In shogi, when you capture a piece it is not eliminated from the game. Instead it becomes the property of the capturing player, who can place it in an empty square as a future move and then use it normally. So in the example I gave above, red would end the exchange with an extra queen and a missing rook and blue would have an extra rook and a missing queen. Red would not only be stronger than blue but also ahead of green and yellow. This rule puts the incentive back into going on the offensive.
