I was thinking that this would make a huge difference… But on thinking about it more, I’m not sure that blocking a check with the duck would be a wise move. Doing so means that on your opponent’s next move, they’re guaranteed to have a duckscovered check, which you’ll then have to deal with again. You could keep on ducking out of it repeatedly, but that’d mean that your opponent gets to keep making adaptive use of the duck, but your use of it is tied up. And eventually your opponent might deliver check from multiple directions. Eventually you’re going to have to respond to the check with your non-avian pieces, and whatever response that is, it’s probably what you should have done the first time.
All of that is correct. Using ducky to block checks is playing with fire, though obviously you may end up having to resort to it.
I said you “can”, not that you should be aiming to do it on a regular basis
Ideally you can take a “protected” piece with the king and then use the duck to stop the king’s recapture, giving him time to get back to safety.
There was a multi-panel comic in Mad magazine back in the day where two guys are playing chess and one of them nods off. He then wakes up to claim that the other guy took advantage of his nodding off to cheat on the board. (Whether or not the cheating actually happened is not indicated and is irrelevant.) The sleepy guy then picks up the board and throws it, pieces and all, at the second guy, who ducks.
The punchline panel is cutaway to a couple driving in a car and on the shoulder is one of those yellow caution signs. This one says “Caution: Game Crossing”. Meanwhile, aforementioned chess set and board continues its trajectory across the road. The woman in the car says:
“Good thing we slowed down for that.”
I was aware of that wording, but it’s often used unspecifically.
The purists would huff and puff I’m sure, but why not? If it’s fun and innovative, play it.
Have I ever mentioned you play an irritating game of chess, Mr. Spock?
Some years ago Martin Gardner wrote a regular mathematical column for Scientific American. He referred to chess revisions like this as “fairy chess”. One type that he mentioned added a BLUE queen, that either player could use.
There are a ton of variants out there. Chess.com even has fun ones like “fog of war” chess, where you can only see the squares where you can move to (obviously, not practical for over-the-board [OTB] chess.)
Here’s a list of their variants:
Perhaps the most well-known variant is Fischer random chess or Chess 960 where the back rank is shuffled for both players in one of 960 ways. A lot of grandmasters play in Chess 960 tournaments sometimes. In 2019 FIDE held the first official FIDE recognized tournament where Wesley So handily beat Magnus Carlsen for the top spot, and Ian Nepomniachtchi beat Fabiano Caruana for third (all current Top 10 – and three of them top 5 – ranked players in classical chess.)
There are also variants with new pieces, like bishop-knight or knight-rook compounds (see: Seirewan chess or Chancellor chess.) These types of new pieces are called “fairy” pieces, as mentioned above. There are tons of variants with these pieces. There’s higher-dimensional chess, too, with 3D boards. Or different sized boards. This Wikipedia article sites over 2000 different variants.
If I were still teaching math, verifying the 960 possible starting positions of Chess 960 would be an interesting problem to give a combinatorics class.
I notice a bit of a problem in the way chess.com describes the possible starting arrangements of the pieces:
Piece Placement
Some restrictions are applied to piece arrangement to preserve original chess dynamics. Listed below are the rules that are respected in this variant.
- White’s minor and major pieces must be placed on the first and last rank, respectively.
- White’s and Black’s position must be mirrored. For instance, if the white queen is on a1, the black queen should be on a8.
- The two bishops of each player must be placed on opposite-color squares.
- The king must be positioned between the two rooks. This means that the king will never be on the a1 or h1 square for White and a8 or h8 for Black.
The rest of the bulleted list makes sense, but what’s that first bullet saying??
I mean, it seems clear to me what they’re doing: the pawns stay where they usually are, but White’s pieces on the first rank get scrambled randomly within the two restrictions that (1) the K must be between the R’s, and (2) the bishops must be on opposite colors. And then the Black pieces on the opposite end of the board mirror White’s pieces.
That’s from bullets 2-4. But what does the first bullet mean?
I can’t make heads or tails of it. Chess.com’s other explantation of Chess 960 doesn’t include that point.
The starting position in Chess960 is random, but there are a few requirements.
- Bishops MUST be on opposite-colored squares.
- The king MUST be placed on a square between the two rooks.
- Black’s pieces are placed opposite White’s pieces.
Your quote seems to have left out the words “and Black’s”. It just means that the pieces stay on the first and last rows.
I’ve been thinking about this some more… What would an endgame look like? Capturing a king would be extremely difficult: The king’s own square would need to be either double-attacked, attacked by a knight, or attacked at melee range, and every square around the king (including those containing attacking pieces) would need to be either similarly threatened, or blocked by friendly pieces. Granted, the duck could be used to partly block in the king, but that’s just one square. Traditional techniques for restricting a king, like locking him behind the wall of squares threatened by a rook, just won’t work, because the king can block the rook to walk through the wall. It seems like a rather significant amount of material would be needed to force a win, and so if you could trade your opponent down to below that amount of material, you could force a draw at worst.
Well, I’d hate to try to win with K+R v. K or K+2B v. K in duck chess. But most endgames in regular chess come down to being able to Queen a pawn, or not. And my WAG, based on all zero of the times I’ve played duck chess, is that K+Q v. K would still be a very winnable game. Get your K two squares from your opponent’s K, move your Q to one of the mutually adjacent squares, and the duck can’t be interposed.
Needless to say, contributions from anyone who’s actually played this variant would be welcome.
K+Q vs K is obviously trickier than the usual, but all the moves available to the Q would still allow you to back their K into a corner.
K+R vs K…now that seems very hard to me.
I’d note in response to the comment above, forcing someone to trade pieces is very hard…any recapture two or more squares away can be blocked, and usually will be. Also, knights are at a real premium, so you will work to protect yours while trying to trade your B for theirs.
If you want to see some good examples, International Master Eric Rosen is pretty addicted to the variant…
He won that one, of course, but it appeared to be against a significantly inferior opponent, such that the win came from the king blundering into the line of fire (and earlier, the opponent basically just gave away their queen). I’d like to see a hard-fought endgame, where the loser makes the winner really earn it.
Checkmate positions certainly exist with K+Q vs. Q, but I’m unsure that it’s possible to force those positions. Usually, piece endgames involve forcing the enemy king into smaller and smaller regions of the board, until they’re up against a wall or a corner, as necessary. But restricting the enemy king is much harder, in duck.
Pretty sure it’s possible to force it because of all the Q moves available, and because you can put the duck on the square where you don’t want it to be next move. Unfortunately, not sure how to prove that.
Is it possible to play these variants against the computer on Chess.com or do you have to play against another human player? I’m a bit to introverted for play against a stranger, but would like to try out the variants.
Even though you don’t have to talk to them at all? You can disable chat.
Well I might for example decide to quit part way through or want to take a long time thinking about the position, take back moves to look at variations etc. Basically I like to play the game at my own pace in my own way on my own time and not have to worry about being rude.