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

This page is written by the game's inventor, Lev Grigoriev.

Homo Scacco

I was reading the article “On Designing Good Chess Variants”, and imagined: what if all pieces are same, but one royal still exists? By this, it still can be chess variant.
Name is made by "homo" prefix that can be read as "home" (back rank start) or "human" (meaning fair street battle where all have same powers and chances) and "scacco" being both Italian "chess" and "jumping" (compare with Russian "скачет" meaning "jumps") which strongly relates to Knights.

Rules

Board is standard, 8x8. 
1st row is filled by White, 8th by Black pieces.

All pieces are same, but pieces starting on E file are royal, i. e. cannot move into attacked spaces and must be protected if your, or should be checkmated if opponent’s, to win the game. Repeating the same position twice is not allowed. If royal is stalemated (cannot move but not threatened), this counts as a draw.

Main version has Knights (where all pieces move knight-wise), but there can be versions with Silvers (step one diagonally or forward directly), Wazirs (step one directly), Kirins (steps one diagonally or leaps two directly), Modern Elephants (steps one or leaps two diagonally) and other short-ranged pieces.



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By Lev Grigoriev.

Last revised by Lev Grigoriev.


Web page created: 2024-01-07. Web page last updated: 2024-01-13