ABSTRACT CHESS

Variant of Traditional Game
(c) João Pedro Neto (2003)

This game is played on a 8x8 square board with the following setup:

 

STACK - a stack of one to six regular stones of either color. A royal stone (marked by a point in the diagram) cannot belong to a stack. TURN -  On each turn, each player must do one of the following things: Move a friendly stack. Transfer one regular stone from a stack to an adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) friendly stack. Capture an enemy stack by replacement (as in chess). MOVE/CAPTURE RANGE - A stack move/capture range depends of its size. A stack of size 1 moves like the chess Pawn (except there's no initial double move, no en-passant and no promotion). A stack of size 2 behaves like the chess Knight. A stack of size 3 behaves like the chess Bishop. A stack of size 4 or 5 behaves like the chess Rook (except there's no castling) A stack of size 6 behaves like the chess Queen. The royal stone behaves like the chess King. GOAL - The winner is whoever captures the royal stone.

The idea of this game is to strip out all the awkward chess rules, while providing another way to build tension, tactics and overall strategy (using the new transfer mechanism).

An example White's turn. The white King is about to be captured by one of the two white rooks. However, if he transfers one stone from the h6 knight (making a pawn) into the g7 rook (making a queen), the Black King will be captured in the next move.

Read some comments about the game. There are two ZRFs to play the game: one by L. Lynn Smith with stack oriented visual, and another by Peter Aronson more chess like.