I'm not a big chess player, but I'm a game designer, so the world of chess is still fascinating. The complementary pieces are reminiscent of myths, real armies, and RPG classes to come.
As a reminder, in Chess:
- There are many pawns, they have their own special attack, and they don't move the same way they attack.
- Rooks are very easy to visualize and you can really feel the tower stones grating against the board when they move. They also have a special attack but it's a bit meh.
- Bishops are more agile than rooks but they can't reach the other square color, a bit like two concurrent churches that never get into direct conflict.
- Knights do their own short-range thing and inspired countless mathematical problems. In complement to bishops, they HAVE to land on the other square color every time.
- The king has a simple moveset but a somewhat convoluted way of dying because that's pretty much the goal.
- The queen is overpowered.
But since chess is a game that was already invented[citation needed], it's not the kind of design you'd want to analyze over and over if you want to make games. Enter chess variants.
In this article I'm going to touch 3 types of chess variants and list my favorites among them.
🐝️ The historical ones 🐝️
Chess wasn't the only king of games in the Middle Ages. There are also Xiang Qi in China, Shogi in Japan, Makruk in South-East Asia, and the whole Indian/Persian/Arabic ancestry line.
The most interesting for me is a rather young one for this category, one of the first hexagonal Chess variants: Siegmund Wellisch's Chess (1912).
Most hexagonal variants use flat-top hexagons, which keep pawns on their file, but they have problems:
- Pawns go closer to promotion through one diagonal than the other.
- The central pawn is very close to the action right at the beginning.
- On regular boards, there's a lot of space wasted on the sides.
Wellisch uses pointy-top hexagons. Pieces start on the same rank and it looks really close to a battle line. The only dowside is that pawns can't really be blocked since they can advance top-left and top-right, and it makes sense for them to move and capture the same way, which has implications, though I haven't found the pawn rules yet on the internet.
As they say, don't change the pawn dynamics unless you know what you're doing!
Anyway, Wellisch Chess has 3 players, which is its own kind of weird, but it's playable with 2.
Pointy-top or flat-top, hexagons are the bestagons. But then variants keep the usual pieces, which is a bit weird if you ask me, because diagonals are much less obvious and let's not even talk about knight moves. Wellisch averts that: knights jump to nearer spaces, and partially fill the roles of bishops which they replace.
🌵️ The simpler ones 🌵️
Some variants try to get rid of kludgy rules like castling, en-passant, or sometimes entire pieces.
Note: I'm not including checkers here.
My favorite one in this category is Los Alamos Chess. It happens on a 6x6 board with bishops removed. It's impressive how it can run on a very early computer. And in a way, the small board is kinda cute.
🏺️ The ones with a theme 🏺️
Some variants try their own thing and sometimes it works really well. Like Philosophers Chess, Alice in Wonderland Chess, or the horror-themed ones.
My favorite is Catapults of Troy by Gary K. Gifford, which doesn't really have a lot of elegance game design-wise, but it's a bunch of cool ideas and it still works.
- The mighty river in the middle can be crossed in many ways: building a bridge, jumping over with the Troy Horse, or tossing with the capult.
- Pieces can be hidden or transported in two ways: Troy Horse or Catapult.
- There's a ram, which is a more dangerous rook that captures opponent and friendly pieces alike and then destroys itself.
All that means the game has an "engineer" feel to it, enabling many strategies. My only grips with it:
- The board is a bit too tall, although that kinda fits the "epic" theme because everything takes longer.
- There are holes in the pawn lines.
- There's a missed opportunity of getting rid of the more "boring" pieces (why keep a rook when you have a ram and a catapult?)
Staying on the topic of theme variants, I haven't found a variant about music, so if I published a spinoff of the Super Note project, that could be a chess variant.
🐔️ Conclusion 🐔️
Honorable mention to Chickens and Dragons by Martin Nilsson, which passes the last two points with flying colors and moves most of the action out of the central squares, turning the board into something like a chicken coop using only mechanics.
Other categories include:
- The almost-normal variants, like Fischer Random, or the Indian one in which the king can do one knight move.
- The big ones, like 10x10 board or bigger, potentially infinite.
- The ones with randomness, more players, or incomplete information.
- Chess with different armies, which is really cool and gives me sport championship vibes.
But as of now, they don't interest me in terms of game design. See ya in the next one!