Check out Symmetric Chess, our featured variant for March, 2024.


[ Help | Earliest Comments | Latest Comments ]
[ List All Subjects of Discussion | Create New Subject of Discussion ]
[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]

Single Comment

Chess Variant Inventors. Find out which inventors have the most games listed here.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Nov 19, 2019 09:11 PM UTC:

Stratego is not a game of perfect information, which makes it very non-chess-like. It is somewhat similar to Banqi ("Chinese Dark Chess") in this respect. Dark Chess or Kriegspiel I also doubt, but these at least are absolutely normal Chess in all other respects, so that they would count according to the criterion that a single fatal flaw can be forgiven if it is completely orthodox in all other respects. Stratego, however, has different board size, different number of pieces, the replacement capture is subject to ranking of the type and can backfire, the royal piece does not move... Even when all pieces would be in plain view it would be nothing like orthodox Chess or one of the other major regional chess variants.

As to Clobber: I don't really believe that this should count as a chess variant, but if you think about it, it gets close. Several games normally considered chess variants lack one of the defining characteristics of chess. E.g. Suicide Chess does not have a royal piece, Marseillais Chess moves two pieces per turn. Clobber does not have many piece types, but precisely because it has only one you could consider that (extinction) royalty, and then it satisfies all other criteria. In Horde (Lord Dunsahy's Game) one of the players also only has Pawns, and in Maharadja and the Sepoys one player only has a single (royal) Maharadja.

I did not want to suggest Amazons could be a chess variant; on the contrary, I gave it as an example of a game that is clearly not a CV, but yet has a piece that moves like a Queen. To show that the fact that in Ultima most pieces move like a Queen doesn't make it a chess variant anymore than that it makes it an Amazons variant.