I wasn’t quite sure whether to place this in Mundane Babble or Entertainment…I decided on Entertainment.
This is a chess variation I came up with.
The board can be a bit tricky to come by; you can find circular chess boards online if you look for Byzantine Chess or Round Chess, but I just choose the low-tech route and make my boards out of cardboard by hand.
Anyways, here’s the rules: 360 Chess
(be patient, it’s a 4 meg PDF)
The only thing I ask is that if you happen to try this out, let me know what you think!
Have you played this yourself? If so, how did it turn out? It looks pretty interesting. Appears more like a battle then a board game. I may give it a go with a friend.
Yes, I finally actually put all this together for my Grandmother-in-law, who is a chess fanatic (and disarmingly evil at the game as well!).
We played, which of course she won with brilliant use of the rules I couldn’t have even imagined…her ability to think in circles and place so that a Check Mate was being done from half way around the board was simply amazing for her first game on such a board.
It was a very enjoyable game.
Another variation, that is equally challenging, is to take the rules of the Pawn and apply them to a normal chess board.
So all pieces are the same, and the board is the same too.
However, the pawn now can move one space forward/backward/left/right, and may attack diagonal-forward-left/diagonal-right/diagonal-backward-left/diagonal-backward-right.
This variant REALLY is difficult because the normal board is so confined (if you think about how many pawns each side has on a normal board…there’s not much “free” room).
And now that pawns move more robustly, you actually have to watch out for them…they are dangerous traps in groups (a group of pawns in a diamond formation - with an empty square in the middle, for instance, is just lethal).
It usually takes most of a game for someone that is versed in regular chess to figure out how to play this variant without getting pieces killed by pawns constantly.
The 360 Chess in the PDF, versed chess players are more on guard because the entire board setup is radically reminding them that the rules are different.
However, if you do this on a normal board…they tend to forget because everything looks the same as their normal chess.
Interesting. Yeah, the first thing I noticed was how difficult it would be to spot a trap consisting of a rook and a queen or two rooks attacking the same piece but one is facing clockwise and the other counter-clockwise. It looks like my kind of game. Is there a digital version of this game variant?
