3 player chess in curved spacetime

[Admin]

We just discovered a very interesting chess game played in curved spacetime

Notice that you cannot move diagonally over the center. Similarly a centered knight only has 6 potential locations to move to

Due to how the board is warped the queen can sometimes have more than one way of reaching the same 'square' which is relevant in the case of of those paths are blocked.

Same logic for movement applies to all pieces.

Pawn promotion
A pawn will be promoted to centaur, archbishop, chancellor or queen once it reaches the area with the pattern no piece for that player starts on.

Starting position
Since the bishops can change color we can have each player start with 3.

 

[Admin]

Last man standing mode
Here you have to eliminate both opponent kings to win.

Stalemate rules doesn't apply until there are only 2 players left (in which case the stalemated player wins).

If you capture a king when there are 3 players left you will gain control over all the material said player had.

You are not allowed to capture a piece to bring the players material count below 3 where
the pieces has the following values for said rule

Pawn: 1
bishop: 1
knight: 1
rook: 2
centaur: 3
archbishop: 3
chancellor: 4
queen: 4

 

[Admin]

First checkmate wins mode
Here the first player to checkmate one of the thing wins. You can also win by getting stalemated.

If a player get checked the turn immediately goes to said player potentially changing the order in which the game is played.

As a start the players play in counter-clockwise order.

Note that the win goes to the player who made the move resulting in the checkmate regardless of whose piece(s) are checking the king (can even be two players at once).

After the match i was thinking that it might be better to instead after a check and move from the checked player have the order go back to the player who made the check (instead of the other player) and then play at the same order for the entire game. This however is something that needs to be tested.

 

[Admin]

Checkmate example
In this example there are only 2 players shown but this also works if there is a third player.

 

[Admin]

Inkscape version
This game can already be played in inkscape.

The board could probably be improved but it should work just fine

To play this variant join one of my discord servers and find another person who also wants to play.

https://discord.gg/duNtTjehbE

 

[Admin]

En-passant
Similar to standard chess a pawn can open by moving 2 squares forward. When if it passes a square where a pawn can capture said pawn can still do the capture if you move 2 squares.

Here for example blue can do en-passant capture if white moves the chancellor pawn 2 squares forward.

 

[Admin]

Draw conditions
Of course all 3 player could agree to a draw

If the same board state has occurred 3 times it's automatically a draw.

If the players has on average made 50 moves or more since the last capture or pawn-move it's automatically a draw.

 

[Admin]

The centaur
A centaur can move like king+knight (but cannot be checked or castle).

 

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Coordinates
The spaces in the middle triangle can be annotated as 2 letters while the spaces outside can be annotated as a letter an a number.

 

[Admin]

2 player variants
One very simply 2-player variant is to just freeze the blue pieces and have green play against white, not allowing capture of any blue pieces.

There are also various rules for moving blue pieces you can try such as you having to move one of the blue pieces you could capture after a move (if you can capture any of them if it captures were allowed in the first place).

Another option is to require movement of a blue piece if a player has a piece/pawn at one of the 3 center pieces (before the player moves one of their own pieces). Maybe then also allow capture of a blue piece if your opponent has a piece in the center.

 

[Admin]

A better board
From the testing we found that it took effort to see how pieces would move diagonally acorss the board to i came up with a much better version.

Here each pattern represents a promotion area for one of the players. It's the most practically useful board-pattern possible but maybe not the most visually appealing. I did experiment with another pattern shown in attachments below.

 

[Admin]

The archbishop
The archbishop combines the powers of the bishop with the powers of the knight

Here the knight-powers are displayed are marked as green and the bishop powers are marked as purple.

When the game was tested the blue, white and green pieces where used (the black piece designs weren't used):